I Was a Single Mother, Not a Matriarch

I was a happy child in those moments when I sat at my great grandmother's dining room table with four generations and later in her life five generations. Couples and marriages and nuclear families got little play there. And that's why I ran for coastal cities and higher education why I asserted from a very early age that I would never get married. Now I see that it was not my family so-called failures but rather I was suffocating under the aspirational ideal of a normative middle class nuclear family including normative coupledom period.