As a single parent starting over without a community, I have been thinking of ways to optimise my parenting within the patriarchy and outside of religion.
I left my abusive marriage with my then-toddler, and starting all over has not been easy — I had to move abroad where I know no one. I know there are a lot of women like me in similar situations, and I often wonder how they survive. I naively thought it would be easy because I was already doing most of the parenting alone before I made the decision to leave, but I overestimated how much of a toll it would take.
The convenient and easiest way to get around this is often joining a religious group. But as someone who has left the church — and as someone the church enabled in abuse over the years — I would hate to return to a similar environment just because I am desperate.
Another conventional way to get around the exhaustion of single parenting would be to get recoupled, which would likely end in disappointment, especially in heterosexual relationships. As someone who considers dating self-harming, I would not want to put myself through that again. My goal as a woman is to raise myself in a safe environment.
Researching immigrant maternal welfare has consistently confirmed what these women already know in their bodies: isolation is dangerous. Depression, anxiety, and PTSD are significantly more prevalent among migrants than host populations, and mothers carrying the full weight of a household alone are among the most at risk. When a mother collapses, the collapse is generational.
Most women do not hate motherhood. We hate the isolation. When I was still partnered, I had a neighbour to laugh with while the kids played. The labour did not feel like labour. Making friends as an adult immigrant is brutal, and most support services are built for crisis intervention, not connection. What we are missing is not charity. It is infrastructure.
I am proposing a system that allows women to match with other women based on family size — one child to one child, two children to two children — and proximity, to meet, build trust, and eventually co-parent together.
The benefits of this are immeasurable. Shared childcare reduces the need for paid care, frees up working hours, and allows both women to pursue income, rest, or education without the guilt of doing it alone. This is a realistic, unglamorous, and deeply practical way women can begin to build wealth in the long term.
I would love to hear what others think about this: whether they have practised something like this in a non-digital setting and succeeded, and what other factors I should be looking into.