Emma Johnson - The Kickass Single Mom: Be Financially Independent, Discover Your Sexiest Self, and Raise Fabulous, Happy Children

T EN YEARS AGO, when I was married but not yet a mom, I attended a daylong book proposal workshop that required students to bring a two-page summary. My book proposal was about single motherhood. At the time I was thinking about becoming a mother, and reflecting on my own experience being raised by a single mom. I was also curious about how the divorce surge of the 1970s and 80s played out in our society, how that shaped my generation of kids and the decisions we were making as we became adults. After all, I was adamant I would never be a single mom! I would do better, get married before getting pregnant, and stay married. Id do things the right way. My interest in single motherhood was one part personal, two parts journalistic. The idea was nice, said the workshop leader. He smiled and was kind.

Like many projects Ive considered throughout my life, after the workshop I parked this one in a digital file on my hard drive and forgot about it.

Fast-forward a few short years and my interest in single motherhood was reignited. This time it was zero parts journalistic, one thousand parts full-on personal. Despite every single proclamation to the contrary, I found myself as a single mom. For a long time, I was alternatively livid, confused, overwhelmed, accepting, and thrilling in that rolea process that I have seen countless women go through in my work, which is now committed to the empowerment of single mothers.

My story is unique. Yours is, too. Women come to the role of unmarried motherhood by way of divorce, breakup, incarceration, death of the other parent, unexpected pregnancy, and, increasingly, choice. Life as a single mother runs the rainbow, too. Maybe you have a beautiful co-parenting relationship with your ex, who lives a few blocks away and whom you consider your best friend, and you regularly go for mani-pedis with his new wife. Or, more statistically likely, your childs father is barely in the pictureor not at all. Perhaps you were the one who chose to leave a more or less decent relationship because you just werent happy, or maybe your partner stunned you (and your family and friends) by admitting to having another family. Perhaps relations are amicable, or maybe you do weekend switch-off at the police station, owning to a restraining order (or two). Your journey may involve abuse, addiction, mental illness, or an insane court battle. If you were in a relatively happy relationship with your childs dad, there are also likely great memories of time together, shared hope, and plans for a future. Maybe you swore you never wanted kids, but found yourself pregnantand really happy about it (or notand that is OK!). Maybe you always dreamed of that great guy, the four-bedroom house, the dog, two kids, and the two-parent family vacations and holidays. But now youre doing it solo, in a one-bedroom apartment.

We all have one thing in common: Plan A didnt work out.

Single moms tend to have a lot more in common, too: money stresses. Gut-wrenching loneliness. Overwhelm. Social isolation. Feeling of shame for not giving our kids a perfect family. Family pressure to remarry yesterday. No (readily available) sexual outlet. Fear of messing up our kids. Fear of never finding romantic love again.

In this book, I share my own journey, as well as that of other women who have embraced their single motherhood on their own terms. This is a book of lessons on contending with the fact that sometimes in life your plan A doesnt work out. But plan B (or maybe plan C, D, Q, Z) can be really, surprisingly, stunningly amazing.

My plan A was looking pretty decent. So much so that in the spring of 2009 a thought flitted through my mind: Everything is so good. What could go wrong?

After all, my life seemed exactly asno, better thanI had dreamed it would when I was growing up in the small Illinois town of Sycamore, raised by a smart and capable, but stressed-out, poor single mom of three.

Now, at the age of thirty-two, I was living my dream of being a writer in New York City. My ambitious, creative husband and I were drunk on adoration for our year-old daughter, brimming with plans for our familys future. Friends have since told me that from the outside, it all looked wonderfuland in many very real ways, it was. We had bought and remodeled a lovely, large prewar apartment. We traveled the globe. We threw dinner parties. We saved for retirement and college. We signed up for Mommy and Me music classes and had hung a vintage mid-century mobile above our daughters crib. I discovered that I had married the type of guy who got up in the night with the baby and changed endless diapers.

Both my husband and I grew up in divorced families, raised by single moms. We both vowed to give our daughter more.

We were doing it!

We were winning!

I was winning!

In so many ways it was wonderful.

But then a call came.

I was at a writers conference in Manhattan. The general number from the news network where my husband was a photographer was familiar. There were four missed calls. My husband was not in town; he was in Greece, on assignment. There was an accident, my husbands boss said when I finally got through. He fell off a cliff. They are trying to get him on an airplane to Athens. You need to get on a plane and go there now.

The words did not fully register. But I understood it was bad.

It was.

My daughter, then fourteen months, and I rushed to JFK airport and begged the gate attendant to open the closed plane doors so we could board the next flight to Athens. The next weeks were a blur of trying to be there for my husband and understand the severity of his brain injury, navigating the public hospital, and caring for my young daughter. My husband had fallen fifteen feet off a cliff while setting up satellite equipment. Because of the remote location, he had gone hours and hours without proper medical care. By all measures it appeared that his case was miraculous. The surgeon took me aside and showed me the X-rays: See here, this butterfly-shaped mark? he said, pointing to the central point of my husbands gray matter. See how far to the left it is in this picture? That shows how inflamed his brain was when he arrived. This is a very severe injury.