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Single Mothers Quotes

Browse 39 quotes about Single Mothers.

Single Mothers Quotes

“Do you know what strength is - forgetting sleep, romance, money I keep working without rest to unite the humans, that's my strength - a single mother working day and night so her child can have a bright future, that's her strength - a street vendor working hard since dawn for his family, that's his strength. Do you have such a strength of your own? Your ancestry, your family money, your material possessions - putting aside all these, what is your own true strength?”

“Bit by bit, piece by piece, and fractions by fractions, lone mothers are denting the age-old stubborn patriarchy through their active, conscious, empowered, feminist, and emancipatory mothering while pushing the traditional boundaries of family and gendered relations”

“The state and society generally construe single parenthood as an outcome of the breakdown of the traditional heterosexual family; however, what is overlooked in this construction is that diverse situations exist where women as single mothers are encountering different challenges. Also, what is negated is the fact that in modern society, the family structure is altering. In this fast-changing scenario, single motherhood is taking on multiple forms, whereas the laws and policies have failed to keep pace with the shift in the forms of motherhood.”

“If you have no arms To hold your crying child but your own arms And no legs but your own to run the stairs one more time To fetch what was forgotten I bow to you If you have no vehicle To tote your wee one but the wheels that you drive And no one else to worry, “Is my baby okay?” When you have to say goodbye on the doorsteps of daycare or on that cursed first day of school I bow to you If you have no skill but your own skill To replenish an ever-emptying bank account And no answers but your own to Satisfy the endless whys, hows, and whens your child asks and asks again I bow to you If you have no tongue to tell the truth To keep your beloved on the path without a precipice And no wisdom to impart Except the wisdom that you’ve acquired I bow to you If the second chair is empty Across the desk from a scornful, judging authority waiting For your child’s father to appear And you straighten your spine where you sit And manage to smile and say, “No one else is coming—I’m it.” Oh, I bow to you If your head aches when the spotlight finally shines on your child because your hands are the only hands there to applaud I bow to you If your heart aches because you’ve given until everything in you is gone And your kid declares, “It’s not enough.” And you feel the crack of your own soul as you whisper, “I know, baby. But it’s all mama’s got.” Oh, how I bow to you If they are your life while you are their nurse, tutor, maid Bread winner and bread baker, Coach, cheerleader and teammate… If you bleed when your child falls down I bow, I bow, I bow If you’re both punisher and hugger And your own tears are drowned out by the running of the bathroom faucet because children can’t know that mamas hurt too Oh, mother of mothers, I bow to you. —Toni Sorenson”

“We really had a close netted structure to rely on for anything, you could have gone by anyone house and get something to eat. Whatever they were eating, they would’ve fed you, and all the mothers would’ve treated you just like they treated their own. What the gang also did, it provided some level of protection for a lot of the working adults in the neighborhood. They knew that their houses were safe, when they went out to work and didn’t have to worry about anyone breaking in to their homes. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members”

“I never thought to ascribe my mother's emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact opposite of what Eisenhower was taught. I learned that if I didn't exist, the family would be better off. I grew up believing that if I had never been born, things would be easier for the people I loved. (page 35)”

“Sonnet of Single Mother There is no greater superpower, In the world than a single mother. Far superior to the world leaders, Is the resolve of a single mother. Wanna learn to build a society? Wanna become a nation builder? Spend a couple of months as pupil, At the feet of a single mother. Want there to be peace and progress? Hand social reins to single mothers. Stand by them as aide with commitment, Lo and behold, the healing appears. A mom empowered is a world empowered. A single mom empowered is creation empowered.”

“The gangs filled a void in society, and the void was the absence of family life. The gang became a family. For some of those guys in the gang that was the only family they knew, because when their mothers had them they were too busy having children for other men. Some of them never knew their daddies. Their daddies never look back after they got their mothers pregnant, and those guys just grew up and they couldn’t relate to nobody. When they had their problems, who could they have talked to? Nobody would listen, so they gravitated together and form a gang. George Mackey, the former representative for the historic Fox Hill community in The Bahamas.”

“The Rebellions were the first gang in The Bahamas, to come up with a popular logo/brand in the wearing of Raiders clothing. However, other neighborhoods gave birth to their own gangs using popular sporting team images as their official colors and name. You had the Hoyas Bull Dogs out of Kemp Road; the Coconut Grove area took on the name Nike, which became their clothing of choice. Miami Street took on the name Hurricanes, and wore Miami Hurricanes clothing. However, when you look at it closely, because of the lack of involved fathers, a lot of us were simply lacking an image and a positive identity of ourselves.”

“I didn’t have any father to reach out to me. The persons who tried to steer me in the right direction, were the persons on the street and I still went the wrong way. Franco ‘Co’ Bethel, former gang leader and right hand man to Scrooge.”

“90% of us came from single-parent homes who were in the gang. There was just a small 10% who had a mother and a father in the home. For a lot of us, we did not had that father or authority figure who could have intervened on our behalf. Where we could have said, ‘You know, daddy, Johnny tried to rob me or Johnny just slapped me’, and our father could have either taken us to the police station, or went to school with us to address the issue. So we had to defend for ourselves. Shelton ‘Apples’ Burrows reform gang leader”

“The older guys in the neighborhood were our father figures. Even though they were doing foolishness we looked up to them, and they looked out for us. When we would be out playing and it was getting dark, they would tell us now don’t be out here too late, because you know that freaks does come out at night. Anthony ‘Ada’ Allen, one of the former leaders and founders of the Rebellion Raiders”

“The majority of us were from single parent family homes. You could have counted the fellas on your fingers that had a mummy and a daddy at home. Anthony ‘Ada’ Allen, one of the former leaders and founders of the Rebellion Raiders”

“Christina died of a stroke in the fall of 1971, at the age of sixty-one. June watched the nurses take her mother's body away. Standing there in the hospital, June felt like she'd been caught in an undertow. How had she ended up here? One woman all alone, with four kids, and a restaurant she had never wanted. The day after the funeral, June took the kids to school. She dropped Kit off at the elementary building and then drove Nina, Jay, and Hud to junior high. When they pulled into the drop-off circle, Jay and Hud took off. But Nina turned back, put her hand on the door handle, and looked at her mother. 'Are you sure you're OK?' Nina asked. 'I could stay home. Help you at the restaurant.' 'No, honey,' June said, taking her daughter's hand. 'If you feel up for going to school, then that's where you should be.' 'OK,' Nina said. 'But if you need me, come get me.' 'How about we think of it the other way around?' June said, smiling. 'If you need me, have the office call me.' Nina smiled. 'OK' June felt herself about to cry and so she put her sunglasses over her eyes and pulled out of the parking lot. She drove, with the window down, to Pacific Fish. She pulled in and put on the parking brake. She took a deep breath. She got out of the car and stood there, staring up at the restaurant with a sense of all that she had inherited. It was hers now, whatever that meant. She lit a cigarette.”

“I came from as low as one could come, with no mother and no father. So in return I build a family for myself and these fella’s were a part of my family. So I had to look out for them, as if I was looking out for my children. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members”

“Fathers of the fatherless sons and daughters, you all need to get on the full-time ship of love, support, and financial help. Your parental alienation is emotional child abuse. As you violate fatherhood, your children build up walls and it is not so easy for them to forgive. If it’s not too late, you need to make it right." - Charlena E. Jackson, Author of Dear Fathers of the Fatherless Children”

“Single Mothers Your shoulders are heavy, but you stand tall and raise your head high, knowing that you are raising kings and queens, future leaders of the world. You are pounding the pavement, kicking butt, making it look easy but we know better; we know the struggle, we understand the pain. The road feels lonely but you are not alone.”

“Before I was born my father disowned me. You know those ones who get the females pregnant, and then say the baby is not theirs? He rejected me, told my mother that I am not his child, so I never had a relationship with my father. Shelton ‘Apples’ Burrows reform gang leader”

“New York might run on Dow Jones, lattes, dollar signs, and neon lies, but what beats in its breast is it’s people: it’s hip-hop, it’s bodegas, it’s art, it’s Union Square grifters, it’s subway mariachi, it’s two-jobs-and-night-school-thank-you-I’m-fine mothers, it’s daughters full of dreams of making it big, it’s multicolored sons and their hopes blazing bright as a meth tweaker’s eyes.”

“My research continues to amaze and baffle me. As human beings, we are geniuses. What we didn’t get from the home, we find ways of getting elsewhere. It’s evident, then, when one looks at the stats we don’t have a teenage pregnancy problem and we don’t have a street gang problem. I will even suggest that we don’t have a drug and alcohol problem, nor do we have a crime problem rather, these are only the symptoms that we are experiencing, and the real problem is broken homes that result in broken lives.”

“According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the definition of the word ‘rebellion’ is ‘an act or a show of defiance toward an authority or established convention. Extensions of the expression include to fly in the face of danger and to fly in the face of providence, both of which carry a sense of reckless or impetuous disregard for safety.’ Because we did not grow up with our fathers, we became reckless with our lives and disregarded the lives of others as well. Therefore, the problem is not the gangs, so to speak; rather, it’s the conditions that create them. It is the dismantling of our homes and marriages that create the right conditions for gangs to flourish. If homes could be put back together or prevented from falling apart, then these symptoms could be, root cause eradicated.”

“When I look at it carefully, by examining the interviews and the various social scientists’ studies, it becomes easy for me to see that we all were just rebelling. Regardless of the area we grew up in or the gang we were affiliated with, or which part of the Western world we found ourselves in, we all were rebelling. We were rebelling and crying out for our fathers. We were rebelling against the home conditions that existed in our communities. We needed our fathers, but above all we wanted to be loved and accepted by them. Since we couldn’t find it at home and in our respective communities, we created it for ourselves.”

“When you tell a single parent you love them or you want to date them, its not like the conventional love or dating... what they call love is care, empathy, understanding and respect from a perspective that is beyond just saying I LOVE YOU. They have loved, they have seen; there is nothing you'll offer that is different. All they need is peace of mind and if you are not coming to give that, please leave them alone with their kids”