If you are a single mother and are in a place where you must choose between keeping your child and getting married, keep that child.
There is a kind of man who wants nothing to do with the child or children of the woman he has become interested in marrying.
To have his way, he prefers that she finds a way of ditching, concealing or disconnecting from those children.
No individual is important enough to replace the abiding, unconditional love of your son, your daughter.
What is at issue here is an unnecessary dilemma, a selfish man’s demands that mangle and contort a mother’s emotions.
EMOTIONAL
You may succumb to the husband-to-be’s demands for emotional reasons.
And many are the single mothers who have yearned to be loved and secured by the love of a husband, who have been too willing to set aside the lives and wellbeing of their offspring.
Those women have willfully and consciously surrendered their children’s interests in the name of being loved—by men who are simply unwilling to love wholeheartedly.
How can a man be totally in love with you, and at the very same time completely averse to your loved ones?
It is simply impossible for that to be love by any stretch of the imagination; for it is sheer exploitation of a single and vulnerable mother by an advantaged man.
You are dealing with a man who has made you feel secondhand, and to attain some semblance of being firsthand, you must rid yourself of irrelevant cargo.
To him that child, those children; are irrelevant to his plans.
There is no time that your own product can ever become irrelevant and inappropriate to your plans, unless you are emotionally disabled and cannot therefore comprehend what it is to have a biological child.
To him that offspring represents shame, your shame, and he would rather keep the distance from it.
Possibly you already are in such a marriage, where because of how the suitor presented himself you had to even avoid mentioning your two children who have since grown up under another relation in some village far away from you.
If so, you have amputated your future from yourself.
ECONOMIC
Many single mothers have abandoned and denied their very offspring because of hunger and starvation.
Here is a prince who has all it takes to meet all a woman’s financial and material needs, and since he has shown you the amazing love Luther Vandross sang about in 1986, you have shown your babies a red card and never looked back.
And you have swallowed his hatred of what he considers your dirt.
The Bible says in Psalm 68:5 that God is the father of the fatherless, and the defender of the widow—many troubled single mums are widows.
That statement is not conditional; it is a position that the Most High has taken towards all who are in distress, namely widows and orphans.
The trouble with throwing the children out of the canoe in the name of a masculine love that cannot afford to cover and succour them, is that as a single mother you are opting to access comfort at their expense.
They are the collateral you have paid for your luxury and security.
God has made a way for many widows and orphans who have trusted in Him and they have worked to make a life out of dead circumstances.
Many of them are exemplary leaders in their own right today.
Multiple meanings simmer beneath the obvious reasons why single mothers disown their children in the name of marriage.
WEAKNESS
Firstly, such a woman thinks her child or children have become a point of weakness.
No matter they were born outside wedlock, every child is a pride in the family because no child is substantially illegitimate or worthless.
But since the man wants you for his own reasons and to his own advantage—forget your disadvantages—he uses the children as a personal fault you must get rid of.
And if as a single mother you are trying to settle with a man who has no children, the pressure on you to separate from your own blood is immense.
But again, you may be dealing with a man who also has children already, but who has delimited space enough for his progeny only.
Sorry, your children have no space here; feel free to leave if you cannot accept that.
How comical, ridiculously laughable that becomes.
Even more ludicrous is this scenario where a single mother has by God’s grace settled and established herself as an income-earner, able to look after herself well.
All for a long-sought love, she surrenders all she has to a man who shuns her child or children—and wastes her wealth, crippling her financially for life.
FORGET
Secondly, such a woman forgets that the children she abandoned for a marriage cannot forget that she denied them.
She may live happily and blissfully ever after, eventually getting over the pain of sending them away or turning her back on them.
And because of getting over that pain she will forget she ever pierced their souls with a sword—but they will not forget.
In old age, many mothers have tried to recapture their relationships with their now grown and established children, only to be shocked that they still suffer the very same pain she inflicted on them when she cut them off for a stranger.
God Himself acknowledges that a mother fundamentally cannot forget her child, but some mothers do! See Isaiah 49:15.
Children have incredible sensitivity towards their parents’ sentiments, actions and reactions concerning them.
It would appear that the impact of a parent’s words or actions on one’s entire life is known already by the spirit within, which is the meaning of honouring our parents so that we may live long (Exodus 20:12) and that it may go well with us (Ephesians 6:2).
It explains how parental rejection can be suffered by even an embryo in the womb, and that rejection becomes a lifelong wound until and unless it is addressed decisively and healing begins.
A mother can forget she rejected her child or children and consigned them to an impoverished life while she lived in the ionosphere where radio waves of false love saturated her thinking.
Since you cannot un-forget, there is no way at reconciliation decades later to reconnect what deep heartstrings were ruptured when you sent your children away.
They will still feel that forgotten-ness even during reunion.
RESULTS
Some unpleasant results always follow mothers (and fathers) who deny their very children.
For the married mother who has locked her children out of her marriage, the children will grow without any deep attachment to her.
Are you that kind of mother?
You will become the non-existent link in the family tree because you erased from your person offspring that even death does not erase.
You will have given your whole heart to a man who could not give his whole heart to you nor your children; a man whose heart remained planted in his own children the whole time.
You will have paid with your life to raise and establish another woman’s children while yours forfeited your loving care and inspiration.
You will have disinherited your children of all that you were going to pass down to them, and given their inheritance to another woman’s children.
In your old age, you will crave your offspring’s love, companionship, but it will have been withered and wilted by lost time.
In that time of your life, you will crave and covet their forgiveness, but there will be no rest for you even if you obtain it.
It was Jonathan Clegg who asked, in a 1987 song about Nelson Mandela, ‘who has the words to close the distance between you and me?’
Your words to your children will change nothing.
I learned from my young sister Caroline, an unbelievably gifted florist; that plants respond to words of love and encouragement.
I could add that trees do not; and neither can children who grew up wrenched out of mother’s love.
By the time you are regretting having abandoned your children, you will have lived your life outside the reality of your parenthood.
You will have sacrificed your honoured place in their destiny. You will have disclaimed your birthright for fragile comforts.
It should interest you that where a parent was separated from biological children by imprisonment, for instance, that father or mother readily connects with them upon release even after many years.
We have the well-known examples of the children and later generations of Walter and Albertina Sisulu bonding afresh after Walter came out of Robben Island in October 1989, as recorded in Elinor Sisulu’s biographical 2002 book In Our Lifetime.
We also have similar examples of Nelson Mandela bonding anew with his children and their progeny when he was released in February 1990, as narrated in his classic 1994 Long Walk To Freedom.
How different it is when a parent consciously and deliberately cuts his or her child off! And especially so because of marrying a man or woman who cannot become the father or mother figure that the child desperately needs.
LEAVES
And what if that unloving husband leaves you? Where do we go from here?
How would you reconcile yourself with your children? For it will remain true to them that when matters become desperate, mother will flee; mother will let go of us; mother will give us away.
An indelible impression would have been embedded in the children’s thinking, that mother thinks first of herself, not us. We are her children yes; but our love for her is not her priority; she is willing to shelter anytime under a stranger’s love at our expense because we are burdens.
God is faithful, and as a single mother you are in his plan; no matter how many children you have, and because of the children you have. Trust Him to bless you with a husband who will love you and your family—there is a man who needs a woman like you.
Email: timelegacy2017@gmail.com.