The robins are out, hopping through dry tufts of grass left over from last season. To the north, the Bridger Mountains watch over the playground like mothers themselves. Do they ever feel lonely?

Rebekah and I sit on a bench at the top of the hill. She’s in worn out jeans and a pink sweater. Her wavy, brunette hair swirls out from under her beanie. I’m not sure if it’s warm or cold outside. I lean into her shoulder, feeling the warmth of her body.

We’ve been meeting at Story Mill Park for five years, each of us single mothers towing along our single children. Hers is eight, mine is eleven, but when we started this ritual, during the wild isolation of the Covid pandemic, hers was three and mine was six.

“I’m sorry we’re late,” she gasps in exasperation as we settle onto our throne bench on the hillside, overlooking the tunnels and slides below. We are the queens of the playground. Within our view, which is dappled with the branching limbs of cottonwoods and their new green leaves, our subjects run about in cheerful revelry – tiny humans. I shift back against the cold metal of the bench. Okay, perhaps the tiny humans are the little kings and queens, and we mothers are more like the help.

“Titan woke me up at six-o-clock demanding muffins. How am I supposed to parent well when he starts whining before I even open my eyes?” Rebekah, one of the gentlest people I’ve ever met, has a look on her face that says, “Is today the day that I officially lose my marbles?”

“Oh my gosh!” I sympathize passionately, heaving my chest with a wind of breath that could save the most hopeless souls. I envision Rebekah pulling Titan under her covers, tickling him and kissing him on the forehead. Alternately, I see her throwing off her blanket and, like the blessed goddess of dawn, arising with the love of a thousand suns to make the fluffiest, juiciest blueberry muffins allowable on the planet. “Did you put your earplugs in?” I venture.

“I haven’t taken them out all morning,” she laughs. Last year for Christmas, I bought each of us a pair.

Below, I spot four shiny eyes peeping at us beside dirty fingers grasping the top of a wooden structure. Our mischievous offspring dart for cover when spotted, little prairie dogs. Charged with the force of the stars and the spinning planets, children and parents are stitched together in a remarkable, instinctual web of connection. Our children feel us. They want us nearby. They roam and return.

Last night, I was furious with my son. His sensory processing challenges resulted in him acting like a feral animal at Occupational Therapy, literally growling at the therapist and refusing to participate. All of my most generous empathy and my psychology training aside, couldn’t he just drop the animal front? It was a textbook example of Pervasive Drive for Autonomy (previously called Pathological Demand Avoidance), a condition that means my child will very literally die on whatever hill he chooses.

“Help, I’m in a total black hole supernova collapse parenting moment,” I text my girlfriends. They send memes and encouragement, while I heat up a pot of water for boxed macaroni and cheese – the golden staple of any bad parenting day, and in general a good staple for all other days.

I feel my child shuffle toward me in the kitchen. His orbit draws near. In the vast universe of burning gases and expanding space, I am his home. I look up.

There he is, in his pink axolotl onesie. His entire body is powder pink. Six fluffy, hot pink fronds protrude from the sides of his hood. (If you are a parent in 2025, I know you know what an axolotl is. If you don’t know, it’s a Mexican salamander. Yes, that is what the kids are into these days.) He is a pink, galactic burning ball of love.

I hate this, moans the part of me that resents the cosmic joke of parenting. We will talk about our challenges later. For now, I open my arms, the home base of the cosmos bringing in this little, stellar being. He nuzzles into me, gathering the love dust in my heart.

Reassured, the axolotl child scuttles into the living room, announcing to our Alexa device, “Play the soundtrack to Jurassic Park.” These days, my Spotify revolves around John Williams symphonies and “The Most Annoying Songs in the World” (the playlist name, not my words). As the music swells, my son sweeps his arms emotively through the air, shifting like the flash of a shooting star into the most sincere immersion of conducting an orchestra. He is absorbed.

I can’t help myself. I smile at my pink axolotl child, madly thrown into the music. In fact, I am in awe.

This winter, I got to join a four-week online course for single mothers. On Zoom, little boxes popping up like bubbles from underwater, hundreds of single mothers’ faces came into view. We were like wild bison, a multitude of a rare species. The chat flooded with comments: “I can’t believe there are so many of us here!” “This is so beautiful!” We were in awe of ourselves.

Being a single mother is like a secret. In all the world, no greater resilience is known. I will forever be alone at the center of my child’s universe, the only one to watch him from home base, witness to his growth. I’ll be the only one to catch him when he falls, and the only one to fall into bed at night, exhausted, once he turns out his light. Our path as single mothers, and sometimes single fathers, is solitary and unwavering. For this, we receive the honor of a very special kind of beauty, like a desert rose, bestowed in our hearts.

Like wild bison, there are, in fact, so many of us. It is a boundless joy to share this intimate, secret path with another member of the pack. Susie is a single mother who owns a home near Cooper Park.
Her daughter is in her first year of high school. On our most recent mom-date, we spent the last quarter of our time sideways on her kitchen floor, fishing out a lost food container from behind its proper drawer. An unraveled wire hanger in each of our hands, we worked together like mates on the sea, grunting and sighing until we (only because there were two of us) snatched the little bugger up and shimmied it back to safety. This is what single motherhood looks like.

At the park, the sky has changed from silver to fair blue. Some of the tiny humans have come and gone, their mothers and fathers, noble rulers of the land, directing their unbridled frenzy. The child who orbits around my center and the child who orbits around Rebekah’s are collecting fallen branches of the cottonwoods.

“Happy Mother’s Day, Queen Rebekah,” I say, as I reach into my pocket and hand my friend on the park bench a beautiful card. It is bursting with brightly colored flowers, a whole sunshine of possibility. Thanking me with melting sweetness, she reads the card, and I smile at the beautiful mountains watching over us.