By Vanessa Cort
AS the world paid tribute to women everywhere last Tuesday, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, I wondered how women running households on their own have been coping.

On the cusp of the third year into a pandemic which has seen both sexes lose their jobs, children pulled out of schools, day-care facilities closed and prices rise, women have been bombarded.

Mothers who head single-parent families have been especially challenged. Many depended on day-care services in order to work. And the domino effect has been catastrophic as these centres were forced to close their doors because their staff – mostly women – had to stay at home and take care of their children.

Ironically, some of these workers too were the sole breadwinners for their families and were also scrambling to keep food on the table and adjust to their radically changed circumstances.

But they had to get it done. Those who could started working from home,  some resorted to selling clothing and items not often used, others reached out to family members for help and all were forced to “cut  and contrive”, as one woman put it. The race was on to find alternate means of raising money.

While economic factors differ from country to country and within rich and poor countries, single mothers all over the world have certain things in common.

Kristen Rogers reporting for CNN said, “Many single moms are the only people who can ensure their children are fed, educated, comforted, disciplined and safe…”

And single mothers have had to draw even more on their woman’s ability to multi-task and ‘wear several hats’, as they juggled routine household tasks with children constantly underfoot and acted as home-schoolers in addition to all their other roles.

However, experts at the Child Mind Institute in the US have come up with some suggestions to help single mothers cope, while acknowledging, “There’s no magic bullet that will make living through this crisis easy.”

At the top of the list is acceptance of the situation or what Rachel Busman calls “radical acceptance”, which means that you “accept what is happening in the moment without judgement rather than fighting what you’re experiencing”.

She points out that accepting the situation does not mean you have to like it but it means you are better equipped to deal with feelings like anger and frustration.

Single mothers are also advised to acknowledge that they are in “survival mode” and urged to be kind to themselves and remember that though they may feel lonely they are not alone because, “Everyone is going through this in one way or another”.

Stephanie Lee, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute says, “I think we need to dispel the myth that this is a good time to work on things. This is a time to survive and get by and that’s okay.”

Certainly, many single mothers were in ‘survival mode’ even before the pandemic and felt ‘at the end of their rope’ as the virus struck and their stress level surged.

For as the UK Gingerbread Organisation put it, “Since the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020, single-parent families have borne the brunt of the economic and social fallout. Prior to the pandemic, single parents were already more likely to live in poverty than coupled parents”.

Since the majority of single-parent households are run by women then this means that women, in particular, have been struggling under the tremendous weight of providing for their families.

Now that countries are opening back up, along with schools and daycare facilities, the intense pressure has eased somewhat on women who single-handedly run their homes, but the crisis is far from over.

And perhaps the best advice from the Child Mind Institute is for single mothers to lower the parenting bar and “Accept that there are going to be some days when if you can get everybody fed and bathed and squeeze in a little activity, that is a good day.”