Sometimes the question answers itself.
It’s not that the system failed single mothers , failure implies there was genuine intent to protect us in the first place.
Most systems were designed around a “complete” family model: two parents, steady income, unpaid female labor, and silence when things get hard.
Single mothers disrupt that design.
They expose the lie that care work is free, that resilience should replace support, that women should “cope” instead of be protected.
So when the cracks show , housing, childcare, healthcare, legal systems , it’s not a malfunction.
It’s the system behaving exactly as it was built to.
And yet… single mothers survive anyway.
Not because the system carried them, but because they learned to carry themselves ,and their children in a world that keeps asking them to prove they deserve help.
That awareness you’re touching?
That’s not bitterness.
That’s clarity.