I’m a single mother – want to give me a hand with the groceries?

As I haul multiple shopping bags from my boot, while my toddler skitters between parked cars, my neighbour nods hello from his back porch, while ashing his cigarette.

Each week – despite knowing that I am a solo mother by choice with a donor-conceived son and no partner at home – my neighbour watches me teeter inside, a leaning tower of motherhood with hefty bags and a yelling child attached to my shins. I smile brightly and say hello, but my mind is a static of expletives: why doesn’t he offer to f------ help?!

Life as a single parent is challenging and there’s not enough help around.Credit: Greg Newington

It’s not entirely my neighbour’s fault. I could ask him to help, but I don’t. What’s stopping me? I consciously chose this solo path, of course, and I embraced all the work and self-reliance it would entail. That said, I know plenty of other mothers with partners, and multiple jobs, who often need an extra set of hands.

If this were a town square, a hundred years ago, my neighbour would no doubt get off his arse and help carry my bags or watch my child while I do the return trip to get the second load. But parenting and all its attendant domestic minutia has become increasingly atomised.

I don’t ask my neighbour to help because my generation of parents has swallowed the belief that parenting should be shouldered alone.

Many people have moved away from their home towns to other cities or countries and find themselves without the support of family or the easy reliance on old friends.

Parenting, instead of being shared, has become isolating, exhausting, and expensive. We believe that by asking a friend to babysit or a neighbour to carry our groceries we become a burden. We’d rather pay a stranger to enter the intimate, ecstatic and porridge-smeared corners of our life than feel indebted to a friend.

I’m part of a movement that is trying to reclaim a village-model of parenting. As American author and solo mum Mikki Morrissette writes, “The goal of a single parent is not to raise our children alone. The goal is to consciously create the village in which we and our children will thrive.”

Each week, despite my discomfort, I push against the belief that I must be self-sufficient. I get by with a lot of help from my parents, my brother and the angels I pay, like childcare educators and babysitters. More occasionally, I ask friends. Another mother is watching my son so I can write these words.

It goes without saying that the task of parenting falls mostly, squarely upon the aching backs of mothers. And beyond that, to other women, who work for paltry wages to care for our children or wipe our kitchen benches.

As New Yorker columnist Jia Tolentino writes: “Many of the modern rituals of motherhood – the all-female baby shower, the all-mommy WhatsApp group … teach that caregiving is a project for women to figure out with other women.” But what if we all saw ourselves as parents, no matter our gender or our parental status?

As a single parent, I’m not the only one who could benefit from more support. Married straights, queer couples, single dads, foster parents, grandparents – all of us gain from raising our children collectively.

At this point you might be thinking: I’m here, I’m willing to help. Let me tell you how. Offer to carry shopping inside. Put a child into a car seat. Lift a pram up the stairs. Ask a mother if she needs to go to the bathroom (alone, without a child-barnacle) before you part ways. Pick up some groceries or coffee on your way over (we’ll pay you back, we promise).

If you’re sitting at home scrolling away your evening then relocate your screen time to my place so that I can step into the night air as my child sleeps. Make concrete suggestions: food or furniture assemblage or taking my son to the playground for an hour. Know that I’m capable as hell, but I’m also constantly tired and often stretched thin.

Know that I can’t drive across town to meet you for a social outing as my child will whine all the way there. Take the emotional load of finding a cafe with a playground attached that is between our homes so we can meet there. Come over and make me dinner.

What will you get out of it? You will get the giggling hilarity of my toddler as he hurls himself onto your back; you will gain a sense that we are all part of a messy, connected family. You will be inoculated against loneliness. You’ll know that you’re needed and required and loved; that you have a purpose, a part, in this sacred and shit-smeared job.

You are here to raise a child, to teach it about words and weather and the crime of double-dipping. You can show a kid how to be in the world – to teach him to be a person who stands up from his porch and asks, “Need a hand?”

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