In recent months there’s been a brouhaha surrounding the so-called plight of single black women, arguably spearheaded by Steve Harvey’s best-selling Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man and brought into prominence on the internet by Nightline’s controversial “Why Are Black Women Single” and Helena Andrews’s newly-released Bitch Is the New Black. I’ve read everything from scary statistics to scary solutions and thought I’d offer my input on the topic: single (black) women, don’t despair because relationships and the family that they often engender are not always what they’re cracked up to be.
I love having a husband and children. To have a partner who supports and respects you, who brings out the best in you while reminding you, from time to time, that you’re not perfect, and someone with whom you can laugh often is what a lot of us women – and men – dream of. To discover the divinity of unconditional love that comes with children is a gift I would bestow upon everyone. To be the one person a young child comes to for comfort when she’s sick or scared or just wants to cuddle is validation that you’re doing something right.
However, marriage and motherhood come with a downside so steep I sometimes long for the advantages I had when I was single. Below are the five most important things I traded when I lost my single status.
1. Uninterrupted sleep. At least my kids don’t sleep through the night. When one wakes up for a drink of water, you wake up to give it to her. When you realize that the body lying next to you is not your partner, you have to get up and put said body (sometimes kicking and screaming) back in its own bed and sit there until it falls asleep. I’m a light sleeper so when my husband breathes too loud or, heaven forbid, snores, I’m wide awake staring at the ceiling. He pulls the comforter off me and rolls it around his heavy body so that I wake up … cold. When all this happens as often as it does in our home, you’re exhausted, and you still have to get up at 6:45 the next morning and drop the
one child off at school and give your undivided attention, all day, to the one who’s at home. They don’t understand, nor do they care, that Mama’s tired. They want Mama to take them to the playground or color or play with their dolls. That’snot to imply that single women always get their eight hours a night. The difference is that the latter is usually by choice. You stay up late to polish
that presentation that might get you that promotion. You were with your girls until 3:00 am talking and laughing and having a good time. You wanted to watch the end of the late movie or you were on FaceBook way too late.
2. The right to be sick. When I was growing up, I heard my mother say that with young children you can’t even be sick. This is one of the hardest parts of parenthood. Whether you have the flu or a bad cold, when you’re sick, all you want to do is sleep, or at least lie on the couch and watch crappy TV. When you have a family, you have to keep going. The deal that my husband and I made when I left my job to work at home as a freelance writer and editor was that I would be the primary care giver. And it made sense. We depend primarily on his income, so he can’t up and leave work when the kids are sick. As his parents live over an hour away and as my parents live in America, when I’m sick I still have to go on. Lunches have to be made, milk has to be poured.
3. Time. My days are not fully my own although working from home has provided me with an enviable degree of control over my own schedule. However, having a family takes a good deal of that control away. Even before I had children, I couldn’t just not come home after work. If at the last minute I wanted to have drinks with my colleagues after work, I had to let my husband know. I always had to work with his schedule, and vice versa. It’s not just my week-end anymore. If there’s
something I want to do in the evening, personal or professional, I need to make sure my husband’s going to be home on time and vice-versa. There are no more spontaneous road trips to be had. Dinner has to be done by 6:00 in order to get the kids in bed by 7:30. Now my oldest has her play-dates and sports activities and so forth, and who gets to cart her around? And on whose time? Gone are the days when I could roll out of bed at 10:00 on a Sunday morning and pick up a doughnut and coffee on my way to spending the afternoon rollerblading around the streets of DC.
4. Individuality. This can be as banal as decorating your house or apartment exactly the way you want it with the furniture you picked out. It’s as mundane as leaving a stack of papers on the table before you go to work and finding it at the end of the day in the same place as where you left it. It’s
dealing with your own messiness and watching what you want on TV every night or choosing the movie you want to see every time. It’s about doing what you want to do without consulting with anyone or worrying about the long-term affects it’s going to have on your relationship or your children.
5. Being responsible for myself. This sums up the previous four points and is this simple: when I get up in the morning, I’m automatically responsible for three people. Sure, my husband helps me with the morning routine, but even with help, I’m responsible for getting myself and two children dressed, fed and out the door on time. If we go to my in-laws’ for the weekend, I have to pack and unpack for three people. If we go out for pizza, I have to think about sweaters and pull-ups and menu choices for three people. When I buy groceries, I have to consider that my husband always wants to eat meat and that my children don’t want to eat veggies. I can never go anywhere empty-handed; I’m either carrying a child or my children’s stuff. The family car, i.e. my car, is always full of crumbs and my husband is always reminding me that it needs to be cleaned.
I wouldn’t want my life to be any different than it is right now, and when these frustrations take the forefront of my daily thoughts, I balance them with the joys that come with my lifestyle choice. I don’t have too many regrets about how I’ve lived my life or the decisions I’ve made save this one: I wish that while I was single I could have embraced being responsible only for myself. The one piece of advice I’d like to give to all you single (black) ladies is to be where you are. Take stock of what you have right now and spend as little time and energy as possible on the illusions created around relationships and families. They’re not always everything they’re cracked up to be.
Let me start off by saying if you leave me a funky comment (lol), I’m going to assume you just read the title GOT really offended and decided to go OFF on me before I put You On to some things I’ve heard, learned, and experienced as far as working with black women online.
Now before I go any further, let me be clear (as I’m sure you already know this), I am a black women entrepreneur / blogger who works mainly with black women, but what a LOT of black women are telling me is that folks tell them “Don’t Work With Black Women (Period).” Sistas you know this, you’ve heard it, and maybe you believe it …. point being that’s what folks are saying.
The rub or the kicker here is THAT many black women that I work with, myself included feel compelled to work with other black women or women of color in general. While there is a stigma around it and not much money in it (on the surface it seems) we are driven to do it. The fact is that as black women we know that we aren’t as targeted by mainstream media as much as we would like, so many of us with visions of changing the world feel compelled to do our part to put black women in the forefront of the conversation. The only problem here is that we as all know words DON’T pay the bills, so while we are trying to DO PRO-BLACK WOMAN Things online that make us feel like our destinies are being fulfilled we are coming up against the whispers, worries, and the realities surrounding the idea ‘Don’t Work With Black Women (Period)’.
So what is the REAL Problem here and what is my point? I’m about to air out our dirty laundry y’all, so excuse me while I open the windows (because it’s going to get funky lol). With the recession and even a few years before it, we have seen a growing number of black women entrepreneurs (especially online). Many black women entrepreneurs online see the net as a space where we can afford to create our visions in the form of blogs, coaching, books, movies, fashion, etc. BUT many of us are having a hard time getting the job done. Either the large companies don’t see our market as a market that pays (so we can't get big sponsors and ad contracts like well let's be real - white bloggers online) OR we aren’t buying black amongst ourselves for an exhausting list of reasons. You’ve heard it before, everybody wants to work with you or be on your website BUT they can’t afford to pay or don’t THINK they need what you’re offering. SO in the end we just have a growing number of black women online with amazing ideas and absolutely no profit generators. A small group of us figure out how to rise above the pack, stick in there for years and keep going while the rest quietly fade away, because no one was really looking at them in the first place.
I had to get that out because that my friends is the truth. We groan about it in our homes, write about it on our blogs, vent about it amongst each other, but that’s how it is which is why folks keep screaming, ‘Don’t Work With Black Women !’ and you know what I do …. (lol) I work with black women. I am determined to work with this group on my terms because I know if I do anything else… if I fake it and focus on white women or just everybody so I’m more main stream, I’ll get frustrated like many of my sista bloggers and feel like I’m selling out. I know if I force it and just pitch to black women with corporate gigs and nice pocket books, I’ll look fake because that isn’t who I am. I know I’ll lose it all if I try to be anything other than who I am because in the end all the posers trying to sell things and be who they aren’t STILL aren’t making money so in the end isn’t it better to be happy by my own standards than try to live up to or fall into everyone else’s?
Yes! I say yes, because it’s working for me. No, I’m not a six figure sister yet and I won’t lie to you and say that I am. No, I am not getting even everyone on board, even with all my buzz. As a matter of fact, I started 
