Pallavi Gogoi

They talk about the stigma.

They all push back.

It is so interesting.

I talked to a single mom in her mid-30s in Philadelphia, Danielle Townsend.

She talks about how difficult it was, her first few sort of years of having her child.

She felt like she was in survival mode.

You know, her realization that she is going to now have to take care of her child by herself, she just brings herself together.

She goes and gets a master's degree.

She, you know, pursues a career that she really wants, which is librarianship.

She pushes back against that narrative of, like, you know, that you have to have a father at home for your child to turn out okay.

And she also shares that, you know, she would love to raise her child with her child's dad, for instance.

And she says that and the statistics actually do show it.

A father might be at home, but is not kind of the primary caregiver almost always is the mother.

And a lot of men are not necessarily showing up to either take care of the child or also to take care of the household, not at the same level as the women are.

So a lot of the women I talk to actually say what Danielle just said, which is that, you know, do I have to take care of a child and a grown-up at the same time and clean up after them?

Yeah.

Oh my God, there's so many.

The woman that we met in Winchester, Virginia, Adrienne Brumley, it is so powerful for her to say that I do not regret for a moment that I decided to have my baby.

There are so many other mothers.

I'll tell you about one more mother who is really resourceful.