Not the Whole Story: Challenging the Single Mother Narrative

Sara’s Story

25 Sara’s Story I’m a single mom. I’ve been a single mom for 35 years. I come from a little town on the island of Newfoundland. I grew up in a very small house with my mom, dad, and 16 siblings. I am the fourth oldest child. They were very hard times. We had a tiny house that had tiny bedrooms and was never very warm. My father was away most of the time and we kids had to do what we could. We cut, dried, and stored the wood for the wood stove. In the winter finding food was really hard. We ate whatever we trapped. My older sister had moved away so I was like the second mother. I learned to bake bread when I was 11, and from then on I did a lot of cooking as well as the cleaning and the laundry. My mom was sick a lot, and she was really overweight. She did not like doctors and didn’t go when she needed to. My father was an alcoholic and used to drink away most of his money. My mother never had any money to take care of us and became very abusive to us. I think my mom wanted to love us, but I don’t think she ever learned how. She didn’t have much of a chance. I never blamed my mom, although I used to get angry at her when she hit us. Sometimes it would seem like we had a little bit of a relationship and she loved us a lot, like when we played cards, but then the next minute it was like she hated us. My mom used to get my dad mad, and he would take his frustration out on us. I remember one time when I was 12 or 13 when my mom got really angry at me. When my dad came home she told him I didn’t listen, so they locked me out of the house for two days. I ended up staying under the house. When my brothers tried to bring me mittens they also got in trouble. A few years later, when I was 15, I was a little bit late coming back from the store because I met a friend. I got a really bad beating from my father. My father was almost 6'5", 300 lbs., and had hands like bear claws. He liked to just reach out and knock us down. My father was a vicious person and I hated him. He beat us all. He used to beat my mom. He beat my older brother really hard. When he was sober we could talk to him, but he was not sober very often. If my parents got mad at us, they took the food away. I remember my dad saying that there were certain cuts of meat that were for us and certain cuts just for him. His friends got the roasts. My father supplied the judge with moose and caribou. My father was buying the judge so we had nobody to turn to. He treated his friends better than his family, so they thought he was a great guy. When he beat us, we had nobody to turn to because they believed him. 26 Individual Stories In his younger years my dad worked with the railroad. After that he worked on a boat as a cook, and then he worked construction. My dad was a smart man, but he was a stupid man too. My mom was stupid to even stay. I said to my mom once, “Why don’t you leave Dad? We can make it. We can plant a garden.” My mom told me: “I can’t leave your dad because I love him.” As I started getting older, I thought I was going to meet a man who would beat me because he loved me. In the romance books I read I started to notice that the woman was always in love with the bad guy. At a pretty young age, maybe as young as eight, I realized that my mother was not very old. As I watched her being treated the way she was, and not getting the care she needed, I thought, “I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to be like my mom.” She wasn’t comfortable and always worried about what my dad would think. I was determined that I...