Killin’ it!

In the month of Mother’s Day, it’s time to celebrate the moms doing it alone

By Robb Murray

As two adults chat about the wonders of children’s books, 2-year-old Aurora’s ears perk up. She’s heard two words she knows very well.

“Yes, ‘Goodnight Moon’ is a classic,” one adult says.

Aurora’s eyes spy that book, perched on the edge of a coffee table in Jenny Jones’ Mankato apartment. She points to it, then bashfully takes a few steps back.

“Do you want Mommy to read that book for you?” Jones asks.

Aurora nods, smiles, flips her hair back. Jones grabs the book its edges slightly frayed, the story already memorized — and begins.

In the great green room there was a telephone

And a red balloon

And a picture of the cow jumping over the moon.

And there were three little bears sitting on chairs.

And two little kittens and a pair of mittens.

And a little toy house and a young mouse.

And a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush.

And a quiet old lady who was whispering hush.

At the word “hush,” Jones leans into Aurora, an index finger pressed vertically to her lips to emphasize the hush.

Jones finishes the classic tale’s final words — “Good night noises everywhere” — and mother and daughter clap, smile and rejoice in the wonder of a well-read story. Aurora hops on mom’s lap and lays her head on her shoulder. They embrace, and Aurora gently pats mom on the back.

In a few short minutes, a perfect picture of parenthood emerges. Happy mom. Happier child. A well-read book. Soft music playing. There’s even a fluffy dog perched on a dog bed in the corner.

What this picture does not have is dad.

This isn’t a story about single moms lamenting the absence of men. It’s a story about single moms who, despite significant challenges — social, cultural, systemic, stigmatic — are killing it in the most important area: raising children.

We’re taught to think two-parent households are the ideal, and in a perfect world, every child would grow up with two parents who A) both love each other, B) want to live together, and C) want to raise children together in the same loving household. But over the years, the “norm” has been evolving.

In 1968, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 85% of children grew up in households with two parents. By 2020, that number had dropped to 70%. Single-parent household numbers, meanwhile, grew quickly. Single-mom households grew from 10% to 21% in that same time period. And singlefather households grew from 1% to 4.5%. In 2021, 40% of all babies born in the U.S. were born to single moms.

While there remains work to be done making it easier for single moms to do their jobs — and it still is a more challenging row to hoe when raising children solo — it’s also true that there are plenty of them who are doing just fine on their own. You might say they’re killin’ it.

These are their stories.

Sk8er girl

“I grew up in Mankato,” Jordyn Erickson says. “By the time I was 14 or 15, I couldn’t wait to get away and go anywhere other than Mankato. However, at the end of my senior year, I found out I was pregnant.”

Erickson had dreams. Big, bold dreams.

Instead of the basketball court or band room, the place you’d be most likely to find her was the street, zooming down alleyways and launching off driveway slopes on her skateboard. In high school, she idolized her sister, who was already an accomplished skateboarder pulling in sponsors and living the kind of carefree Montana life Erickson wanted.

So that was the plan: graduate from Mankato West High School and pull out of Mankato to win.

And then

“I was terrified,” she says of learning she was pregnant. Suddenly a dream she’d had of heading west and finding a career in the skateboard industry — her goal was to become a writer for a skateboarding magazine — seemed to be vanishing.

She thought about her options.

“I knew that — while some people don’t agree with this — there was the option of abortion,” she says. “I’m not going to deny that I thought about it. However, I couldn’t get myself to do it. I had an appointment and everything, but I couldn’t do it. And I guess I never really completely understood how my life was going to change other than the fact that I was now stuck. I had all these future dreams, and this was going to potentially interfere with those dreams.”

Her outlook brightened after talking to her sister, who gave her some big-sister advice.

“She said it doesn’t have to interfere with my dreams. It just might take a bit longer to get there,” Erickson says.

And then, a funny thing happened to her on the way to getting out of Mankato.

Mankato happened to her. There are countless people who thought of Mankato as a pit stop or detour on a grand journey to someplace bigger, better, more important.

People get into the layers of Mankato where the schools are good, the people are helpful and the amenities are better than they thought, and they suddenly begin considering Mankato as a destination rather than a pit stop.

“Once I had my daughter, Eliza, I realized that I didn’t want to leave Mankato,” she says. “This is the perfect place for a child. And now I actually love Mankato.”

One of the things that made the parenting journey’s early days easier was the support of her family. Erickson says they jumped in immediately to get her through what could have been a difficult time.

“If I didn’t have a supportive family, I don’t even know if I would have made it.”

She says her parents helped watched her two children when she was taking classes at South Central College and, later, Minnesota State University. She and her children also lived with her parents.

It was the kind of help she wishes every single parent had.

“For those first three years it was very helpful,” she says of the time she lived with her parents. “I feel for those single moms who don’t have the support that I had.”

In the early days of living on her own, however, it wasn’t so easy.

Her water was shut off and her car taken away because she couldn’t afford payments. Her second child was extremely colicky and no one else could take care of him. She was barely sleeping, dealing with depression, had to quit her job and eventually filed for bankruptcy.

“I was miserable,” she says.

Eventually, her son improved and she was able to start working part time, which led to a full-time job at Cultivate Mankato, where her son goes for day care.

Erickson has been through a lot, and she still loves Mankato. But there are areas where the community — and society — could improve, the most dire of which is affordable child care.

“We need that so people can go get an education,” she says. “Or work full time and not have their whole paycheck going toward child care. But that whole system is broken and I could go on and on about the child care system. There needs to be government funding for child care, and we need way more access to affordable housing.”

The Dinah & Torin show Some people are proud of their children. And others are PROUD.

If you were connected with Dinah Langsjoen on social media, you’d no doubt say she’s the capital letter variety, and in the most adorable way. Thousands of photos on Facebook and Instagram over the past three years leave undeniable evidence that these two are best friends for life.

The single-mom concept isn’t a foreign one for Langsjoen. She grew up in one. In fact, her mom at one point was raising seven children on her own. Dinah was the youngest.

“I remember from a really young age not really understanding what the need of a male was,” she recalls. “I remember meeting my best friend and wondering why there was another man there. Like, ‘Oh, who’s that?’”

Single motherhood, she says, felt natural. She’d watched her mother do it for years and then, when she found herself in a similar situation, it didn’t faze her. Why should it, she thought. Her mom did it with seven. She only had one.

“It just felt natural. It just felt like I already knew what to do. I knew it was possible because of my mom’s story,” Langsjoen says. “In my head I was like, What do I have to complain about or worry about? That was my mentality. It’s possible.”

Possible. That, in a nutshell, in Dinah’s take on single parenting.

She urges single moms or single dads to not change anything about their approach to parenting just because a family doesn’t look like the “norm.”

“Do the same things dual-headed families do,” Langsjoen says. “I’ve talked to so many people who are like, ‘Why would I do family photos?’ Because you’re a family! You’re identifying your home as a family. That’s you, I can’t say that one enough. Why not document the fun that you have. It’s your life. Just because you don’t match what other people are doing with theirs doesn’t mean that you’re less happy than them.

“And it’s not like a show of ‘I’m trying to overdo it so that I can make myself look super happy,’” she adds. “It’s like ‘We are happy.’ It sucks a lot of the time, but it’s also really awesome a lot of the time because I get to be like a dictator.”

She doesn’t mean that in the Benito Musollini/Joseph Stalin type of way. More like a benevolent dictator — which is sort of how most parent-child dynamics work, for obvious reasons. She’s not having to temper parenting decisions with anyone else. It’s her values that dictate the decisions. And she likes it that way.

Langsjoen has plenty of advice for single moms and anyone dealing with single-parent families.

For schools: Don’t assume every child has a mom and dad at home.

For people dwelling on past mistakes: “Because like I said, on your past like there’s nothing to be ashamed of even the choices you’ve made, mistakes you’ve made. They were right for you in the time you made them. That’s why you made that choice. Two years ago, five years ago, whatever. It was right for you at that time. You don’t have to feel guilt on it.”

For moms or dads: Don’t wait for other people. Do the things you want to do; live your life the way you want to live it.

“When I was buying this house, I was kind of in a relationship, or I thought I was, and it was like, do I want his opinion on this house? No,” she says. “Do the things you would do without the other person involved. Because it’s still your life. My longest relationship with was Torin’s dad, and it was six and a half years. When that ended, it ended. You can’t just wait.”

Lady Fire Dancer

Statistically, when it comes to motherhood, Jenny Jones was a late bloomer.

“I never thought I could get pregnant and then I got pregnant,” she says.

But it didn’t work out at first. She lost two pregnancies in her 30s.

“It broke me,” she says. “And then I just gave up.” She was living in Georgia, a place she says — at the time — didn’t mix well with her worldview.

“They were really racist and just not very welcoming,” she says with nervous laughter. “No Minnesota nice there.”

She returned to Mankato, her hometown, where she still had family and a supportive friend group. (In her younger years, you may have seen Jones performing at a park or festival. She was a member of a fire-dancing troupe, and could be seen twirling flaming sticks.

She no longer has her “fire things,” though; they were lost when her storage unit was burglarized.)

Not long after returning to Mankato, she became pregnant a third time. This time brought Aurora.

“It was like surprise, surprise!” she says. “It was a miracle and a blessing. I love her. I thank God for her every day. She’s just amazing.”

She says Aurora’s father and her had just started dating when the surprise came.

“We never really had a chance for us to be us before we had to deal with this whole other person,” she says. “We tried We tried. But it’s just better for some people not to live together. He’s still around.”

Venturing into single motherhood, she says, was unnerving. She worried about finances, of course. And she learned right away that her friends and the community were not going to let her fail.

Friends launched a GoFundMe page to help make sure Jones and Aurora had enough money to survive.

“That helped a lot. Bless them,” she says through tears. “So I’m very thankful.

Jones says she’s noticed a disparity in the way society views different forms of public help. When it comes to child care assistance, “nobody bats an eye,” but when she’s paid for groceries with public assistance program funds such as EBT or SNAP, people glance at her. And not in a good way.

“I work two jobs and I have a small business,” she says. “I work hard and those extra things help. And nobody should feel ashamed because it’s there for a reason. It’s there to help you know, it’s there for support.”

Jones works as the gambling manager at the Eagles Club and delivers pizza for Pizza Ranch. She also is a salesperson for the Scentsy scented candles company.

Mankato, she says, is an ideal place to raise children.

“It takes a village to raise a child, and I’m glad this community is raising mine,” she says. “There’s good people here. That’s the attitude here. Happy to help. What can I get for you? What can I do for you?”

One helper in particular is someone she calls the “feeding every baby” lady (find her on Facebook). Jones says that, for the first year of Aurora’s life she relied on Feeding Every Baby, which is an official nonprofit based in Eagle Lake, for food and diapers.

That kind of help, she says, is what makes Mankato special. It’s also the kind of thing newly minted single moms should seek out and use.

One of the not-so-glamorous things about single motherhood, she says, is housing. It took her months to find the place she’s in now, a two-bedroom basement apartment that rents for $900. The place is adequate, she says, but not immune to some of the things that often plague rental housing, such as that burglary.

“Finding a place was so hard,” she says. “Every place we looked at was just so expensive or didn’t allow dogs. This place is $900 a month, we live in the basement and our view is the sidewalk. I don’t control my heat here. My hot water doesn’t work half the time, the neighbors are loud and my stuff got stolen.”

As for advice to new single moms, Jones says to focus on the positive — and give yourself grace.

“Don’t beat yourself. Everybody makes mistakes. The best thing is just to have a lot of patience and enjoy it because it goes way too fast,” she says. “Even if they’re driving your last nerve into the ground, take a deep breath and love them because it’ll pass and pretty soon they won’t be living with you anymore and all you’ll have are your little memories of these peanuts.”