Living Without Love: Single Motherhood

I’ve lived without love for 1,629 days now. In the early days, hope for a more *real* love sprung forth from the release of “it’s” grip. A love which caused so much pain can’t be true love, can it?

Now I could dream big.

Four and a half years later, and the mirage of hope is gone. Despite the begging, believing and praying that someone would return me to the sea and envelop me in his waves, all I’ve felt are dirty rain drops.

Those with love often struggle to understand the impact of its absence. After all, love is not perfection. It is arguments and misunderstandings; compromises and festering disagreements; annoying traits and competitions in who’s the tiredest. We could all live without that.

And yet love is more. So. Much. More.

Love is a shared smile. A touch of the arm. A warm embrace. A shoulder to cry upon. It is someone. Someone who cares. Someone who will join you in the light, and the dark. Love isn’t about the grass being greener; it’s about there being any grass at all. It’s the base and the frame of life itself.

Ill-health. Death. Redundancy. Repossession. Those are considered life’s hardships. Yet the real hardship is getting through those times. The measure of a good life isn’t that you avoided the bad bits, it’s having someone to hold you through them. It’s having someone to feed your soul when you’re at your weakest, and someone to luxuriate in you when you’re strong. Love is the vitamins and the minerals of the soul. Without it, bones become brittle and prone to breaking.

Love.

Do you know what happens to the soul without love?

It deteriorates.

It’s a slow process. Un-noticeable at first. Everything else is to blame. The exhaustion of being a single mum. Having a shitty time at work. Being stressed about little one’s behaviour. The fear of never having more children. Friends growing distant. The elephant in the room is constantly avoided. Once your soul has significantly deteriorated, the next stages of life without love emerge. The anger. The sadness. The impatience. The (over-)sensitivity. You’re quick to snap, quick to hurt and quick to collapse.

With every knock I become a little weaker. The bruises disappear, but not before chipping away at my roots until standing becomes a herculean effort. The exhaustion pumped, beat by beat, around my entire body until my toes ache with despair. Doctors try to diagnose me. Depression. Low mood. Anxiety. All avoiding the one missing ingredient – life’s main ingredient.

Love.

Nothing can be right without love.

Love feeds our roots, allowing us to recuperate from life’s bumps, to grow strong and blossom. Oh to blossom; a life not merely about surviving and making do. What joyous bliss is this you mention?

Without love, every time I move forward, I slip back down again. It doesn’t take much. A challenging bedtime. A tantrum. A scream filled night.

Dealing alone, day,

after day,

after day,

after day, takes its toll.

Alone in the moment and the aftermath; the sharing and the knowing. A loneliness that shrouds every tear you wipe, every meal you make, and every book you read, with an invisibility cloak. Once you’re this weakened, every minute knock feels like a gale force wind. Everyday, you file away your experiences and emotions inside you; where else can you release them? Their unwavering presence eating away at you.

The love of friends and family helps, but it’s a cruel irony that living without love makes it harder to form or maintain any connection which strengthens you against such winds. Friendships and familyships fade under the pressure of single parenting. New friendships may grow, but anything more than five minutes interruption free is rare. Meetings end with a taste of bitterness – misunderstood, unheard and brushed over. This knife edge existence too hard to explain in one sitting. Soaring upon my achievements one minute; plummeting the next. Confusingly the highs and lows can be one and the same; a liberating dance in my lounge, babe in arms, quickly descends into a jig of misery.

What could I have been with love? How high could I have climbed with someone to push me upwards? I had been on the verge of achieving something once, but now what? I cry tears when I see other women achieve. Ugly tears of jealousy. Athletes. Singers. Politicians. Women who set their gaze on the moon and landed on the stars. Me? I’ve been sucked into a black-hole, it’s force-field too strong for anyone to single handedly pull themselves out of. My star-gazing days are over.

Here’s the egotistical bit: I want to see true, fierce love, reflected back at me in eyes I love. I want to know that when I leave this earth there will be someone left who feels my absence excruciatingly in every detail of their life. How life affirming it would be to know that of all the people on the earth, someone chose me. I want to be someone’s world; to have created our version of the world together in miniature.

Elderly couples often die in short succession, the pain too much to bear. For the long-term loveless, this pain is merely scattered throughout our lives. Searing through us on a continual basis. Science says the same. Those who are lonely die earlier. Is it any wonder then that every single ounce of my being silently begs to be loved by someone. Is it so wrong to admit that living without love hurts? Am I not merely evolution in action? Is that not why children’s stories are resplendent with it; huge businesses grows up around it? Every where you look, love is the question and the answer. I’ve tried to find it but you can’t search for it like a job (though I have done that also); eventually work will be found, after all we can compromise to put food on our table. But love. Love cannot be found in compromise. Love has to be love, to be love.

Love – the oxygen of the soul – without it I am slowly shutting down.