Parenting solo means carrying an enormous amount of uncertainty every single day. Questions pile up faster than answers ever could. What if you’re making the wrong call? What if this season breaks something in your kids that can’t be fixed? What if who you thought you were supposed to become is completely out of reach now? You keep moving anyway, because stopping isn’t an option. And somewhere in all that forward motion, you’ve probably noticed that the strategies you use to cope with not knowing – the control, the overplanning, the numb scrolling at midnight – aren’t actually making you feel more secure. They’re just keeping you busy.
Courage doesn’t always look like boldness. Sometimes it looks like staying open when everything in you wants to shut down.
Robert Beeson, Founder & CEO of Solo Parent, and Amber Fuller, a counselor with a Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy (MMFT) and single parent, sit down for an honest, grounded conversation about what it actually looks like to face the unknown without losing yourself in the process. With just the two of them at the mic this week, the conversation is personal, vulnerable, and deeply practical. They get into the biology of why uncertainty feels like danger, the two unhealthy places most of us drift when we’re overwhelmed, and what it looks like to swap a white-knuckled grip for open hands.
Most solo parents know what it’s like to feel like the floor could shift at any moment. The co-parenting situation is volatile. The finances are uncertain. The kids are struggling and you’re not sure you’re handling it right. You lie awake running through every possible outcome. You double down on routines and expectations hoping they’ll hold everything together. Or you quietly check out because the pressure of pretending you have it handled is exhausting. You feel guilty for not having more answers. You wonder if other parents are doing this more gracefully than you are. And beneath all of it is this gnawing question: if I can’t control the outcome, what do I even do?
Key Insights from This Episode
- When Fear Is Driving, Even Good Instincts Can Work Against You
- Curiosity and Wonder Are the Path to Peace in the Unknown
- The Goal Is the Step, Not the Outcome
When Fear Is Driving, Even Good Instincts Can Work Against You
The fear of not knowing isn’t a flaw in your character. It’s wired into your nervous system. As Amber Fuller explains, the human brain is built to scan for certainty because for most of human history, not knowing what was around the next corner meant genuine physical danger. So when your situation feels uncertain, your body responds as if something threatening is near. Your nervous system fires. Your mind scrambles to predict, to control, to solve.
That response isn’t wrong. It becomes problematic only when we let it drive the bus.
What gets harder to see in the middle of that fear response is what it produces in us over time. Amber describes two common patterns. The first is rigidity – doubling down on rules, expectations, and control as a way of manufacturing a sense of certainty. The second is numbing out – checking out through wine, scrolling, or just mentally drifting away because the pressure of pretending to have it all together is too heavy to sustain. Robert recognizes himself in the second pattern, describing times when a legal notice from an attorney would arrive and rather than solving anything, it would just obliterate his ability to be present with his kids for an entire weekend. It didn’t give him control. It stole his resources.
Amber puts a clinical name to the underlying trap: personalization. The belief that it all depends on you. That if you can figure out enough, control enough, predict enough, then you can guarantee safety for yourself and your children. The problem is that life doesn’t actually work that way, and the chronic over-functioning that results is exhausting without being effective.
The painful irony is that the harder you squeeze, the less secure you actually feel. Amber describes working herself into a frenzy of structure and expectation during the years her children were young, convinced that if the boxes were checked and the right things were done, everything would be okay. She describes that time now with honesty: it was not helpful, and it was not healthy. Neither is the alternative of checking out entirely. What both paths share is that they’re rooted in the same fear. One tries to outrun uncertainty by controlling it. The other tries to survive it by pretending it isn’t there. Neither one brings peace.
Curiosity and Wonder Are the Path to Peace in the Unknown
Socrates said it plainly: I know that I do not know. Amber returns to that phrase in the conversation as a kind of anchor. She didn’t arrive at that place easily. For years, her answer to the unknown was to clamp down harder, expect more, and push her children toward the outcomes she believed would keep them safe. When her teenagers began pulling away from the faith practices she had built their family around, she doubled down further. And it didn’t work. What started to shift, slowly and with real effort, was learning to hold things with open hands instead of a closed fist. The more she squeezed, the worse her relationship with her kids became. It was only when she loosened her grip that something real began to grow.
Her son, who now identifies as an atheist, initiates a weekly Bible study with her. Nine months and going. She couldn’t have predicted that outcome with rigid control. It grew in the space she made when she stopped squeezing.
Robert comes at this from a framework he’s been sitting with more recently – one that distinguishes between Greek and Hebrew understandings of truth. In the Greek model, truth is fixed, absolute, litigated – right or wrong, black or white. In the Hebrew understanding, truth is unfolding, constantly revealing itself, something you move through rather than something you possess. He’s honest that this isn’t a lens he was operating with during his own years of solo parenting. But reflecting on it now, he can see how much that posture might have changed things – how much energy went into demanding certainty from situations that were never going to deliver it, and how differently some of those seasons might have felt if he’d been able to hold them with a little more wonder and a little less grip.
Neither Robert nor Amber is suggesting that letting go is easy. It’s simple but not easy. But both of them point to the same discovery: peace doesn’t come from getting certainty. It comes from making room for something other than control. Letting go of a perceived sense of control takes courage. And what tends to be on the other side of that courage is more freedom than most people expect.
The Goal Is the Step, Not the Outcome
One of the more tender threads in this conversation is about what happens when you look at your future as a solo parent and genuinely can’t see how you’re going to make it. Amber’s own story is worth paying attention to. When her marriage ended, she was working at a church. She had no idea she would eventually become a therapist. She didn’t see that future because she couldn’t have. She just took one step toward the thing that felt like a nudge, then another, then another.
Her advice to anyone looking at a future they can’t quite picture: don’t sprint into the unknown. Peek around the corner. Take one small step. Listen carefully for what might be ahead. You don’t have to have the whole plan. You just have to be willing to take one step without knowing where it leads.
The step itself is the point – not what it produces, not whether it lands perfectly. Anyone who has built something real has taken steps that didn’t go as planned. That’s not a detour from the process. It’s the process. Failing is proof you’re living, Amber says. And if you’re going to attach meaning to a step that didn’t land the way you hoped, let it be this: I was courageous enough to try something I wasn’t sure about.
What neither of them wants you to do is go it alone. Robert describes someone who reached out to him that week struggling with how short his fuse had gotten with his kids. His first response wasn’t a strategy. It was: find somewhere to open up. Let it out. Choose to let it out. Because the internal chaos that doesn’t have somewhere to go will always come out sideways.
One step taken alongside a trusted friend, a community, or a faith practice is exponentially more sustainable than one step taken alone. The path forward doesn’t require certainty. It requires willingness – willingness to move, to let someone walk with you, and to trust that the unknown ahead of you is not a threat but an invitation.
What Steady Looks Like When Nothing Is Certain
Single parenting is one of the most sustained acts of courage most people will ever walk through. Not the dramatic kind that gets recognized. The quiet kind. The kind that gets up again. The kind that asks for help even when it feels like admitting defeat. The kind that loosens its grip on outcomes it was never meant to control.
You are not failing because you don’t have all the answers. You are not failing because you got overwhelmed or numb or rigid in the middle of something hard. Those responses are human. What this conversation invites is something simpler: the practice of staying curious. Of naming what you’re feeling. Of letting someone into the fear instead of carrying it alone.
Control was never the goal. Peace is the goal. And peace tends to show up on the other side of open hands.
Whatever is uncertain in your life right now is not a sign that you’re doing something wrong. It might be exactly where you’re supposed to be. Take one step. Don’t go alone. And let yourself be surprised by what unfolds.
