I can already see how my boyfriend and I are going to be parents, when I moved in, I inherited the responsibility of taking care of his three dogs. He plays with them, I feed, water, walk, and pick up after them. I think many men are that way with children. I might be better off without them.

Actually, I think a flat-rate childcare grant is a lovely idea. Ideally (because while I am a flaming liberal, I’m frequently fiscally conservative) I think you’d have to cap it so that you know, the Duggar’s don’t end up bazillionaires.

But of course, the devil’s in the details, and even here in fantasyland I’ve already started courting him. And so, it isn’t something I expect we will ever see in America.

I agree and I would add to that and say that we as a society place the emphasis on the wrong thing when we talk about the importance of a two parent household. Not that I’m saying that shouldn’t be your ideal if that’s what you want– I know that’s what I would prefer. But… okay to use personal examples, my biological mother and my closest aunt were both single mothers. They didn’t have an easy time, by any stretch, but they didn’t struggle as hard as a lot of other single mothers, or even their married sister-in-law, because they helped each other. It goes back to what SarahMC said in the post about how we define “alone.” They didn’t parent alone just because their childrens’ dads weren’t around. They teamed up together and with my grandmother to raise the children, pay for expenses, use my mother’s address to get my cousins into better schools since my aunt didn’t like the ones in the district they were supposed to go to, etc.

But after my mother died, my aunt and uncle insisted on taking care of me and my sister because they thought their household was more ideal because they fit the accepted model of how a household was supposed to run, but things weren’t any easier for my aunt and uncle because having a two-parent household is no good if they aren’t each carrying their weight and being involved in a POSITIVE way. Like everything else in life, what matters isn’t the arrangement, but the people involved in it and how committed they are to making sure everyone gets the right amount of support.

As for this idea that raising your child without a dad in the home sends a message that men aren’t important, that’s a crock of shit. My aunt and my mother remained unmarried after they had all of us for their own personal reasons, but we all remain close to my mother’s ex-husband although he and my mother divorced about 40 years ago. I had a model of what a good man should be like. And I have other aunts and uncles whose relationships are incredible models. Meanwhile, one of many great ironies of life is the relationship between the two people who everyone thought would provide a more stable home for me and my sister was anything but.

The message that was sent to me was that everyone’s life doesn’t look the same. Our families will not all look the same. And they don’t have to for them to be healthy. I learned that it doesn’t matter whether the male influence or model actually lives with you, whether you were raised in a two-parent household, or whether you were raised communally. It matters that you have help from SOMEONE. It doesn’t matter who. And it matters that the people involved are considerate and generous. That is all.