Single parenting is stress. It is about learning how to juggle and balance your life. It is about learning to expect the unexpected. It is 2 AM trips to the Emergency Room, all alone.

It is explaining to your boss that you can't come in to work, again. It's about scrounging change to buy diapers. It's about driving to the local Family Court (who named it that anyway?) and filling out form after form.

It's about sitting in court houses for hours and hours only to end up with some stupid piece of useless paper.

Single parenting is frustrating. It's about feeling as if you never have one second to yourself. It's never being allowed to shut the bathroom door – ever.

It's never being able to blast loud music in your car with the windows down. It's never having time to talk to, or see, your friends.

It's not having a hair cut in two years.

Single parenting is frantic. It's leaving your house and realizing that you've got two different shoes on, or worse, you don't have on any shoes at all.

It's rushing through the grocery store at 7 AM, so that you can get in enough hours at work. It's rushing to pick your kid up at daycare so that they don't charge you the one-dollar per minute late fee after 6 PM.

Single parenting is lonely. Single parenting is single. There are times when it feels like there is nobody on Earth who could possibly understand how you feel.

Single parenting is depressing. It's about taking your kid to the park and seeing all of the happy families. It is about seeing a father play with his son and wanting to throw up.

Single parenting is embarrassing. It's about waiting for that dreaded question, "Where's his father?" or, even worse, comments like, "Oh his father must be so proud!"

It's about wishing that people were more sensitive to holidays like Fathers Fay and Mothers Day.

Single parenting is frightening. It is about knowing that there is a human life that you love more than you thought you could ever love anyone or anything.

It is about knowing that you are totally and solely responsible for that life.

It is about being afraid to screw up. It is about being afraid to make the same mistakes that you thought your parents made, but having nobody to talk to about it.

It is about taking every bit of responsibility for the person your son turns out to be.

Single parenting is guilt.

It's about feeling guilty that you chose such a jerk to father your child. It's about feeling guilty that you didn't heed the warning signs.

It's about feeling guilty and afraid that one day your son will hate you.

Single parenting is empowering.

It's about coming home and collapsing on the couch, smiling to yourself, because you made it through another day. At the same time, single parenting is bewildering because you're never sure how you made it through another day.

Single parenting is watching your child grow.

It's about knowing that you did it all by yourself.

It's about knowing that it is the single most important thing you've ever done.