Just what would you do, living on thin ice?

By JAN GLIDEWELL Off/Beat

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 17, 2000

People are always coming up to you or calling you in this business and saying, things like, "Hey! Why don't you write something about (your favorite cause here)?"

And it's hard to explain that it just doesn't work that way. Yes, we are all concerned about world hunger, homelessness, crime, political corruption and drug prices, but we need a hook to indicate why we are attacking that particular problem at that particular time.

"You need," someone close to me said recently, "to write about the plight of single mothers."

(A quick disclaimer here. Yes, I know that all single mothers don't have the same problems and that not all single parent households are headed by the mother, so we're dealing in generalities that, for many, are harsh realities.)

I replied that I had no hook for the issue, and then, within hours, I stepped onto economic thin ice and heard the sound of cracking in my ears.

"If you were a single mother," my friend remarked when I complained, "you wouldn't hear anything, you'd already be under."

And, it dawned on me, she was right.

When the motor on my recently purchased truck went south and, due to foreign pieces of metal in the cylinders, started to pulverize itself, it was an inconvenience, and was/is apt to be a costly one.

"Sounds like a fouled plug," said one mechanic. "Nah," said another, "sounds like a plug wire."

"Uh-oh (uh-oh is a phrase I hate hearing uttered by doctors and mechanics). I haven't ever seen anything like this before."

So, suddenly, a $4 spark plug had turned into a $40 wire and, within a couple of hours and a couple of more "uh-oh's," was starting to look a lot like about a thousand dollars worth of new engine.

For me, it's up in the air right now on what should be a warranty-covered repair, but the question I got was, "Supposing you didn't have the $260 you just spent finding out what the problem was?"

Hmm.

And supposing I didn't live four blocks from my office and have flexible hours. How would I get the kids to school? How would I get to the grocery store; the day care center; the doctor's office if one of the kids was sick; the drugstore; the laundry?

And how would I figure out how to do all of those things in what, during the school year, would have been the 16 hours between the breakdown and the beginning of school the next day.

I decided to have a beer while I

mulled over the subject and ran into the contractor who is retiling my guest room shower.

He explained to me that the $350 job was starting to look a lot more like $800 (fairly, I saw what he had to do) and, in a couple of days he found floor joist damage that will probably add more.

"What would you do," my (somewhat incessant) friend said, "if that was the only place you had to bathe and you had been saving up that $350 for six months and didn't have the rest?"

There are a lot of "what ifs" for single moms. What if there isn't hospitalization insurance? What if your employer doesn't make provisions for you to stay home with a sick child? What if an employer refuses to hire you because he or she knows you are prone to all of those problems?

What if you saw prospective suitors stop so fast they left skid marks as soon as they saw the toys and pampers in the back seat of your car? What if landlords discriminated against you when you wanted to rent an apartment?

The bottom line is that most of us live with a layer of protection that single mothers don't have, and they live in rusty armor full of chinks that leaves them vulnerable to forces most of us never face.

And a lot of them do fine, just fine.

They work, raise their children, further their educations and at about the same rate as mothers who are married. But it takes, for the most part, more work, more stress and more fiscal creativity.

My friend, it turns out was right.

Someone should write something about single mothers.

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