Be Alive, Be Cool, Cash Out

In her world-famous cultural
Trend Bank, American marketing guru and futurist Faith Popcorn provides single mothers with some incredibly useful buzz words.

Amidst some 17 "hot" trends identified, at least four seem to be almost written for and about single mothers, even though they are meant to describe the populace as a whole. They are: 99 Lives, Clanning, Being Alive and Cashing Out (are you not loving this?) It is within the realm of these kinds of trend analyses that she advises multi-national corporations on how to stay current; how to nail their market.

Being Alive describes a society in which we live so long that 60 is middle-age and "40 is babyhood," according to Popcorn's website. Cashing Out is where you wake up thinking: "I don't believe in the big. I want to live my own life. I'm cashing out. I'm selling my chips. I'm going to live the life I really want to live. And when you have 130 years to live, you'll be living many lives. So you'll say 'until 30 I want to live this kind of life - till 50 this - maybe 55 I'll do something else' ... You'll cash out many, many times," she says. Clanning is "a loneliness trend - it's about wanting to find people like you in places like yours. And it used to be literal like your neighbourhood or your religion. But now with the internet you can create a clan that's global," she adds. And 99 Lives is exactly what is sounds like - having to play many roles at the same moment. What could more accurately describe a single mother's existence?

I came across Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve at a small business workshop this past summer. After years of feeling isolated, it was a gift to be able to contemplate ways I'm like everyone else. After all, I don't really see a lot of Canadian products or services marketed to me. This in spite of the 2006 census that counted 1,132,290 single mother families in Canada; that's some 30% of all families currently raising children.

I suspect it's useful for single mothers to know they are, vitally, part of the larger cultural landscape. Indeed, much of getting over the shock of divorce and becoming a single mother is seeing yourself in commonly discussed threads of thought and behaviour that run through your society - it's a psychological benchmark that helps defeat the feeling of isolation and any hangover of stigma.

So, take heart; throw out a few buzz words and know you're right on trend. Revel in your status as a vital statistic. Recognize that you, along with everyone else on the continent, will probably live many lives, and if you choose, single motherhood is just one of them. And that, apparently, life is very long, with lots of room for digressions and adjustments.