Let's celebrate single women and mums

Last week, a single woman wrote an article in one of the dailies that generated crazy debate. She declared she was single and was not interested in anybody’s husband.

The article generated a flood of reactions.and touched on the jugular of relationships. The woman’s concerns were valid and we married women, are as guilty as charged.

Call it insecurity or just unwarranted jealousy  but there is some uncomfortable tingling a single woman evokes in us married women, we feel like she has a ‘destructive agenda’ and wants to ‘chomoka‘with our jackpot.

We always look at them as suspects (sorry Peggy that’s why I do not invite you to my children’s birthdays. I fear you might tetemesha baba Tasha. Just kidding!). I am sorry, that we treat you like the Al Shabaab of marriage with our hubbies as the ‘soft’ targets.

I mean even in counseling classes we are advised not to be ‘yoked’ with single women lest... But like that lady rightly put it, not all single women are desperate or with an agenda. There are tonnes of single women who are happy with their status.

Another group that receives unwarranted missiles from this society that is so ‘nuclear’ oriented, are single mothers. My heart always goes out to them.

These women are unfairly judged for realities and circumstances that are beyond them. The single mother with a son takes the heaviest blow. I have a friend who is a single mother of and what she goes through is heart breaking.

“I always feel like an intruder in most social gatherings - from church to weddings and all. I feel like a suspect who has to be watched lest I do something socially destructive,” she always tells me whenever I invite her to my church.

She says everybody from married women, to their husbands and single men, treat her with suspicion. Most social settings are tailored to accommodate the conventional relationships but here is a woman, without a man in her life but with an ‘heir apparent’.

“If I am at an event, I always feel like people are dying to ask me, ‘Who is the father of that boy?’ ” she always confesses to me.

With society questioning her morals, it’s brutal when it comes to dating because she has to find answers to explain, how the son ‘happened’ without scaring off her potential date and also not appearing like she is regretting having the child.

“That’s why I hate introductions whenever I am in a social gathering. It opens up many cans of worms. The moment you open your mouth to say “I am so-and-so and I am a single mother of a boy, people draw out their daggers in their heads. “Who is the father? Do you have an inheritance for him?”

On that note, today, I celebrate all the single women and mothers.