ISBN:1565653467
Summary: Addresses many of the ups and downs of becoming a single mother, mainly via the avenues of adoption, divorce, or having your significant other leave once he finds out you are going through with a pregnancy. The viewpoint seems to have a love/hate relationship with fathers and single mothers... she vilifies "deadbeat fathers" while simultaneously being unable to budge from beneath the underlying stigma of "single mother" that she finds herself with.
This was a different book than I thought it would be. It started with scripture, and that's usually a sign for me that viewpoints will be Very Different. ^^
I have to remember that again, this was a book written in a very different time, by an author with a very different background that I.
It features many, many stories of women struggling with poor relationships with the father of their child, and highlights how stressful and un-beneficial having such a relationship can be. Anecdotes of men refusing to visit their children, refusing to acknowledge their children, playing chicken with custody rights as attempted "punishment" when a mother dared to asked for child support, taking out resentment of "having" to be a father on the children and more littered these pages.
Mother's grieved at the loss of their idealized child-father relationship, and wished they had just SMC'd instead of hoping for more.
On the practical end, this book goes in to high detail of many of the more slimy moves that exes can and do attempt during divorce settlements and during early life, and has MANY tips for dealing with disgruntled dads.
"A paternal relationship that is interrupted or unsteady can be more damaging to the child than having no relationship at all." - Page 48
She cites a California legal case from 1981 in which a mother sues her child's father to have regular visits with his child instead of child support payments -- and lost. The mother saw the child's right to a relationship with his father; the courts saw "Involuntary Servitude" (from pg 13). This makes me really sad, that the role of the father in the courts just a few decades ago was so clearly financial only.
Jene points out that even now,
"The involvement of the father is entirely in his control - he chooses what and how much."
This is still true today. If a father wants to be completely apart from his child emotionally? Society nods. Financially? Society frowns slightly. If he wants to be involved? Three cheers and no questions on his rights to be, or not to be. Society cautions women on calling men out on this, to "avoid his children antics and him taking it out on your children, if he is forced to see them/pay the full amount of child support for them." This books makes out the idea of having a man in your life when parenting a scary, risky thing, and paints the average man out as someone who could easily disregard the feelings of his own flesh and blood to Get Back at a women who wouldn't abort for him.
It also introduces another support group, "Mother's Alone", for single mother's from surprise pregnancies/deciding to keep the bay despite adverse odds. I googled the original contact information for this group, and it appears to not have stood the test of time.
Adoption is briefly touched upon, and how difficult it is to be approved for a baby if you are single and over forty, without being in a position to hire a nanny/caregiver.
Here's where it gets interesting. It appears that the Single Mother's By Choice book had been out already for a while, because sallies again the SMC book are evident. Wait.
Jane of SMC versus Jene of Mother's Alone. Heh. Jane verses Jene.
I'm easily amused, what can I say..... ahem, back to topic.
Jene herself goes on to discuss her disgust with Jane's "approved methods" of getting pregnant while single, that include tips on obscuration of the father's identity to avoid legal and emotional pitfalls. Jene's underlying tone still holds fast to the canon that two parent families are the gold standard, and everything else is just attempts at getting half way there by barren ladies adopting children or lonely abandoned women carrying on bravely with their children, all with empty cut out space of where their husbands "Would have been". There is no place in her mind for women who choose to abjure these men who hold the potential for a Two Parent Family in childbirth, even when said men are not interested in parenting.
I find this viewpoint stagnant for today's thinkers.
Overall, interesting book for a different target demographic than I, and a good slice out of time to see how opinions grow and change over fifteen years.
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