March is Women’s History Month.

Making HERstory: How much weight does divorce carry in YOURstory?

#wcw: Cheers to women who inspire women to write new chapters and create new happy endings.

This Friday we celebrate International Women’s* Day. I’ve been thinking about this often, and how gender ties in with the various labels, social constructs, and identities that impact our social culture.

Labels can feel weighted, even when distributed in microdoses. I’ve filled out so many forms over the past few years- government records, school enrollments, medical records - where I had to designate fields that applied to my gender and marital status: divorced female. “Single mom” carries an entire stigma of its own. Sometimes stigmas are best exposed with contrasting contexts: like the memes that rebrand “single mom” to “the one who stayed.”

Source: Good Housekeeping: APR 5, 2022

I’ve also paid attention to how these labels and descriptors hold value over time. Specifically, I notice how my gaze draws toward the ribbons that lay across caskets and floral arrangements at funerals. These ribbons display labels such as “mom,” “sister,” “aunt,” “daughter,” “niece…” 

You know what I never see?

“Single mom,”

“Ex-wife,” or

“Remarried wife.”

As part of my coaching work and my own personal healing work, I started researching “SHE-roes,” or beacons of hope in human form that could offer up inspiration in the wake of divorce. I was surprised to find that some of my favorite female figures happened to have navigated divorce earlier in life. These divorce details otherwise went undetected without a deeper dive into their wikipedia biographies. 

Did you know that Maya Angelou happened to be a divorced single mom at one point in her life? I did not . . . her talent and persona outshone that detail with such luminescence, her divorce story appeared irrelevant to mention. In her words, “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

This famous quote offers a reminder that we don’t have to strive to live up to the achievements of Maya Angelou to create impactful legacies either. Mother Teresa (one of my favorite “single moms”) reminds us that “Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action that we do.”

Life after divorce can begin with this notion of centered love.  This ‘loving action’ might take the form of a child-centered coparenting plan, of caring for your pet, of living an environmentally-friendly lifestyle, of tending to your garden, or of nurturing your own heart with consistent self care.

The butterfly effect is the idea that small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system.

Divorce can feel BIG, life changing, and weighted with labels. Especially for women. But when we take a step back to take in a broad perspective, it’s helpful to recognize the contrast between cross-sectional vs. longitudinal impact of divorce on our lives.

This is not to say we shouldn’t continue to advocate for women with regards to disparities women face after divorce, like health care, child care, and economic pay gaps. It means we can hold both the weighted truth of our imperfect system and the hope of overcoming social barriers in two hands.

The term feminist has been defined in various ways in the literature. One definition describes feminists as people who “recognize that discrimination against women exists, experience a sense of shared fate with women as a group, and want to work with others to improve women's status.” 

My hope is that our shared divorce stories may shape -but never define - who we are destined to become.

How do you picture your fate? 

*Women with reference to gender and divorce in this context refers to all female-identifying individuals.