My Married Mother Taught Me to Be a Single Parent

Maria Mora, age 1, and her mother, 21. (Photo: Maria Mora)

My mom likes to tell me that I was conceived at sea, and I believe her. I’ve seen pictures of the boat and everything. Made of steel and painted white, resting on the horizon of a faded photograph, it doesn’t look like something that should float at all. That’s the magic of seafaring.

I can see why my mom was swept away by a young fisherman who wore a thick beard handsomely long before “lumbersexuals” were a thing. My dad was a captain in his early 20s. There’s a watercolor painting of him in my parents’ bedroom. He’s standing and mending nets — brave, suntanned, and wearing impossibly short cut-offs.

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They’ve been married for over 35 years now, and their relationship maintains the edge it had when they were teenagers. They fight. They laugh. They party together and travel together and love each other deeply. Despite the enduring nature of their relationship, it’s taught me more about how to be a single mom than how to make marriage last.

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I grew up in Florida. My dad’s commercial fishing career took him to Massachusetts for almost half of every year. Just before the school year ended, my mom would take my little brother and me to the marina. We’d draw pictures and tucked them into his captain’s quarters. The huge boat would pull away, my dad at the helm, and we’d cry.

This was long before email or cell phones or Facebook made it possible for a family to stay connected through extended absences. The closest we ever came to email was my mom mailing Polaroids of me and my brother holding signs and drawings.

Beyond a few phone calls and a week here and there in the summer, when my dad was gone, he was just gone. Our family of four became a family of three throughout the hot summer months and the vague hint of autumn in Florida. My mom became a single mom.

Maria Mora, 2, her brother, 1, and their mother, 22, at St. Pete Beach in Florida. (Photo: Maria Mora)

I’m a single mom, and I know it’s a touchy subject to call a married woman a single mother. She had her spouse’s income and the support of inlaws. She had his voice on the phone, and the hope of a safe return. But from my perspective — from the vantage point of a little girl — I only saw my mom accomplishing everything on her own. She unknowingly acted as a role model decades before divorce made my family of four a family of three.

My mom gets sh-t done. It’s a common catchphrase now, but no one I’ve ever known embodies that notion the way my mother did — and still does at 55. She mowed our lawn. She fixed things around the house. She paid the bills and managed paperwork. She drove on all of our field trips and volunteered at school. She drove a massive RV from Florida to Massachusetts, her knuckles white and gaze steady as we navigated winding mountain roads on an Appalachian detour. She worked in the office at the family business.

She was my mom but motherhood didn’t define her. She practiced billiards in our den, her long legs encased in impossibly tight jeans, her permed, blonde hair a halo. We had a regular babysitter who came over once a week and watched “Perfect Strangers” with us while my mom played pool in a league. She’d bring us along to beach bars and we’d play all day in the sun, set free in the wilds of summer, seeking shade beneath picnic benches — lost in our own world while the adults laughed in their own.

My mom kept us busy and kept herself busy, but the longing was always there. I knew that she missed our dad terribly. Each year, she rushed us out to the beach to catch the last glimpse of his departing boat. She sped through the last two states when we drove to see him again, 22 feverish hours up the Eastern seaboard.

I’ll never live like that, I’d told myself. I’ll marry a man who stays home.

But I married a man who took a job that took him on the road, and our marriage became something unrecognizable and irreconcilable and we got divorced — became a cliché, became something I’d never wanted for myself or for my children.

In the devastating first months of being single after a 13-year relationship, I began to realize that what my mother had taught me wasn’t that I needed to marry a man who stayed at home. It was that I had the strength within myself to parent my kids through anything.

She built a framework for me each summer, and that frame propped me up when I sat on the floor crying, night after night, feeling sorry for myself.

I don’t have enduring romance, but I have pride in my identity — not only my identity as a mother but also that of an individual who gets sh-t done. Last fall, I packed my kids up and went on a road trip to Tennessee. We followed a path driven many years ago, when my brother and I were the same ages as my children. I had to prove something to myself. I had to know that I could give my kids the same adventures that my mom had given us.

After 14 hours on the road and a handful of crying and yelling jags, I stood on a mountaintop at sunset, and held my boys and felt whole — not single, not broken, not divorced. Not defined by losses but defined by potential, by my own capacity to love. My mom inspired me to find that moment, to make it my own. I reach for cynicism, try to tell myself I’m being corny, but the feelings are raw, indelible. Thank you, Mom.

I tell my kids stories and take them on adventures, and I know that they won’t remember the things I remember. My mom likes to tell me I was conceived at sea, and I hold that truth in my heart. It’s part of what defines me, along with my fierce love for my little boys and the fact that I know sand feels more slippery when it’s cooled by the shade beneath a picnic bench.

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