[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Aisha and I'm a former host of moca, Single Mothers by Choice or smcs.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Like you.
[00:00:09] Speaker A: As an smc, I decided to become a mother knowing I'd be the sole care provider and parent for my children.
At least at the outset, the MOCA stood for black. So I'm using the word black and I'll be discussing being a single mother by choice from a black woman's lens.
You'll connect with all the interesting and fun things about this non traditional path, like discussing which sperm to use and some hard truths about fertility and the realities of dating as a single mother who doesn't have a co parent to rely on occasionally and what it's actually like to parent as an smc.
This is the Black Single Mothers by Choice podcast.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: I did not come out of the pandemic the same person, mentally, emotionally. I also know that I did not recover, and I did not recover from having two young children at home and being fearful for their lives and simultaneously parenting and working and trying to maintain familial relationships. I did not recover. In fact, I was experiencing bouts of PTSD from the pandemic days. Every time the children had snow days or the children got sick, I could not work and take care of a child. I could not work and have the children home on snow days. And so also there was at my company an entire racial reckoning and people were just unhinged and they were acting out in a reactive fashion without any training whatsoever. So we were going through this really toxic and damaging experience, watching the murder of George Floyd on live tv. And then people were calling you, saying, well, how do you feel about that? How do you feel about your black experience here at the company, which just doubled down on the trauma.
So we went from people pretending racism didn't exist to it being front and center in people's living rooms and them having to see it and kind of live through it. And then we had to experience people asking really deeply personal questions without the proper skills or trauma informed training.
And then this reversal of going back to pretending racism doesn't exist, we pretending that they didn't make those phone calls. And so it was a real mind flub, right? So essentially I got to the point where I had had enough. I was burning out quickly.
It was a toxic environment to begin with, dealing with ptsd, dealing with the medical establishment. I was done. So essentially I left the toxic work environment.
But the. If you're curious about how these early conversations have evolved, you can find the full mashup episodes on start to finish motherhood Full pod.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. If you like what you've heard, please share this podcast with your girlfriends and I'd love to hear your thoughts about the topics covered in this episode. So email
[email protected] if you found value in the topics covered, consider making a donation using the link in the show notes below. Till next time, pod.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Bye now.
