She credits her faith with helping her expand her businesses and her income when she was unexpectedly divorced in 2002. "It wasn't something I saw coming and I was quite shocked by it all," she wrote in an e-mail. "However, once I got back on my feet again emotionally, my home business flourished. I felt led to stay with my home business and watched as my income grew as I continued to trust and depend on my faith in God and His leading my life."
Faith also helped Jill Lucas of Newark, Del. on her journey juggling divorce, her daughter and part-time work while studying to become an X-ray technician. "More than anything it's God who brought us through," she writes in an e-mail. "I've changed and can never be who I was before, but God brought me to the point where I can survive."
Living without a husband's income can create serious financial problems for women. The book "
The Two-Income Trap" by bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi says that that single mothers are more likely to file for bankruptcy than any other group, including divorced men, minorities or people living in poor neighborhoods. And they are 50 percent more likely than married parents to go bankrupt.
The rising costs of home mortgages in good school districts, health insurance and safe cars has made life on one income much harder to afford, say the book's authors. Their research found: "the modern mother starts out her postdivorce life with higher fixed costs, more debt, and less money in the bank -- a recipe for financial disaster."
Although she says she's still living month-to-month hoping she'll make enough to pay the mortgage on the house she just bought for her and her 7-year-old daughter, Marjorie Stockford of Arlington, Mass. says soul searching helped her decide to stick with the flexible non-profit consulting work she enjoyed rather than finding full-time work after she and her partner of six years split up.
"I was very concerned about money," says Stockford who left her 19-year career in the corporate and non-profit worlds when she adopted her daughter Kanha in 2002. Her income was the approximately $6,000 a year support her ex paid her, a modest amount of consulting work and income from her book: "The Bellwomen" about the landmark 1973 AT&T sex discrimination case. "I started applying for full-time jobs," she says.
Then a colleague posed a life changing question: "Have you thought about keeping the consulting work and trying to build on that?" She decided to go for it. "You get off a treadmill, but what you're trading is financial security, which is huge," Stockford says. The flexible consulting work helps her spend more time with her daughter, but it isn't easy.
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