Women

The Breakdown and the Aftermath

The role of women has changed with the breakdown of the family. When the man left the home, women became the breadwinner or sole provider by default, not by choice. Bills didn’t stop. Children still needed food, clothes, and someone to show up. So women picked up what was left and carried it.

I come from a single parent home, and the absence of a father has left women bitterness, broken, and struggling to pick up the pieces. I watched it in my mother. Divorce ruined her. She didn’t just lose a husband. She lost help, protection, partnership, and years she couldn’t get back. Meanwhile, a man could just start over, abandoning his responsibilities like they were optional. That’s what I saw. He walked into a new life while she stayed behind with the weight of both roles.

Barack Obama’s story resonated with me when he says he learned more about the absence of a father than his parents being together. He can understand how it was growing up without a father, and through education and his mother he continued to grow, marry right rather than marry wrong. I understand that. My mother was my education too. She taught me what not to do, what to watch for, and what it costs when you don’t know yourself before you say “I do.”

The Bible says divorce is wrong. I believe it, because I lived the damage. But I also think often we marry wrong without knowing ourselves and developing a strong sense of self and being willing to be okay with being alone. We marry out of fear, loneliness, pressure, or because we think a man will fix what’s broken. Then when he leaves, the woman is left with double the brokenness and all the responsibility.

The breakdown of the family forced women to become everything: provider, protector, nurturer, disciplinarian. Strong, yes. But tired. Bitter, sometimes. Because strength was not a goal — it was survival. The man’s absence changed our role, but it also changed our hearts. We learned not to depend, not to trust, and to carry things we were never meant to carry alone.

I don’t want to repeat it. Like Obama, I want to marry right rather than marry wrong. That means knowing who I am first. That means being okay with being alone until the right person shows up. That means not handing my peace to someone who can walk away with it. The role of women changed because men left. But the healing comes when we stop waiting for them to come back and start rebuilding ourselves with God, not with a man.