I'm Jane Marie, and this is the dream.

Happy single Mother's Day.

My name is Jamila Lemieux.

I am a writer, cultural critic, and mother.

I am originally from Chicago.

I have been writing professionally since the end of my time in college.

I shouldn't say professionally.

I started a blog at the end of college.

It kind of took on a life of its own and that led me to a career as a writer and editor.

I am from the early days of the black feminist blogosphere.

I met today's guest online when she began a discussion about who gets to call themselves a single mother.

And I said, meet. And then a bunch of people piled on saying, well, really depends on if you have help or if there's a co-parent or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It's like, I'm single.

I do not have a partner, so I thought that's what the word single meant.

Ms. Lemieux wrote a book called Black Single Mother, and it's fantastic.

It has a bunch of personal essays from her and oral histories

from a lot of black single mothers. And I loved our conversation. I was an editor at Ebony

magazine for five years, and I've done a number of interesting things since then. I have wanted

to write a book for so long, like my website dating back to 2010s

that she is working on her first book, you know, and I had a literary agent for at least five years

before we sold, and we cycled through a whole bunch of different proposals, you know,

we'd come up with something, I'd write the proposal, and I'd be like, I don't like this, I don't want to write this book, you know, we'd come up with something. I'd write the proposal,

...