Frankie Shaw Quotes

When I found out I was pregnant, my mother said, 'Don't separate your life, the life that you're going to make with this child, from the things that you are and what you want to do.'

When I found out I was pregnant, I was over the moon about it, but I was upset I wasn't married!

It's been very hard, after being mostly a mom, to develop an adult life of my own. And not being married anymore, I have to come up with challenges.

Why is it braver to be a single mother versus being with a partner? Being in a couple and having a child could be more challenging because there might be conflict if the male partner cannot understand the extreme attachment a woman feels when she has a child.

I've had the kind of complex life I write about. I was a single mother for 12 years. I'd been engaged. The wedding fell through. I then discovered I was pregnant and opted to have the child on my own. I was a professor. I was in my mid-30s. I could manage it financially.

I never worried about raising a kid on my own.

I'm not really single. I mean I am, but i have a son. Being a single mother is different from being a single woman.

If you're a caretaker, who are you when there's no one else to take care of?

People say, 'What if your name was Niki Smith?' Well, if Niki Smith lived the life I've lived, it would have great bearing.

There comes a point in many people's lives when they can no longer play the role they have chosen for themselves. When that happens, we are like actors finding that someone has changed the play.

For single women, admitting that you want kids when you're still unattached can feel like exposing a vulnerability. It did to me.

When you're suddenly pregnant and no one is standing by your side, even if you're in your 30s, it's a hard conversation. I'm a traditional girl, and I believe in marriage, and I just always thought that's the way I'd be doing this.

When I found out I was pregnant, I was 22. It was really scary because I was working the music thing, and with a kid coming, you just can't live that life with a child.

Yes, I'm very close to my family. And being that close to your family, I think you also struggle with how to become your own person.

My mom was a single parent.

We should be the natural home for young mothers. But we're not. Because too often we sound like people who think the only good mother is a married mother.

I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.

As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together.

I've always dreamed of becoming a mother. I thought I would get married and do it all the traditional way, but life kept going on, my career kept me busy - and I had not stopped to become a mommy.

To all you mothers out there who are raising your children alone either by choice or necessity, don't let anyone tell you you're not a family.

I think it's really important for every mother to find their own way.

I think there is a moment in every parent's life where we realize that we have lost ourselves a little bit. It's a moment of looking in the mirror and going, 'I need to put on some lipstick.'

I knew deep down that I was going to have my little girl, even if I had to raise her on my own, which is what I did.

If you want to stand with me as a single mom - and I know so many of my friends and colleagues do - please don't appropriate my burden as a way to validate your own. To suggest that you are single-parenting when you are simply solo for the weekend devalues what real single mothers do.

I'm discovering, and I think other mums are discovering too, that when you become a mum, you don't have to change into this frumpy, wholesome role model who is perfect and loses all of your identity. You can still have the same personality you've always had.