Most of us don’t sit down one day and decide to rebuild our lives. It happens more gradually than that – a moment here, a decision there, until one day you realize you’re actually doing it. You’re moving forward. And the question shifts from how do I not just survive this season to what do I actually want to build out of it?
That question is harder than it sounds. Solo parenting means every decision lands on you – the big ones and the ones that shouldn’t feel big but somehow do. Most single parents are trying to figure all of it out without a roadmap, without a sounding board, and without much margin to get it wrong.
Robert Beeson, Founder and CEO of Solo Parent, sits down with Elizabeth Cole, single parent, and Marissa Lee, author and single parent, for an honest conversation about building a new life with intention even when the path forward isn’t clear yet. All three have lived this from different angles, and what they bring isn’t theory. It’s grounded, practical wisdom that only comes from having actually been in it.
Whether you’re weeks into this season or years in, this conversation is a good place to start.
The mental load is real. The tunnel vision that comes with overwhelm is real. The secret waiting for something to change, for circumstances to shift, for life to finally feel settled is real too. Every choice used to have a sounding board built into it, or you always imagined it would, and now it doesn’t. Figuring out how to make good decisions, build something meaningful, and actually claim your own life is what this conversation is about.
Key Insights from This Episode:
- Acceptance comes before a new plan
- Slow down before making big moves
- This season is real life, not a waiting room
Acceptance comes before a new plan
Something many solo parents try first is skipping the grief. Not on purpose but just because there are kids to feed and bills to pay and a whole life to manage, and the grief feels like something that has to wait. The trouble is, it doesn’t wait. It just gets heavier.
The four-step framework Amber Fuller, counselor and MMFT, has walked her clients through starts with feeling – actually feeling what has happened – then healing it, then dealing with the new reality, and finally making meaning out of the life that’s in front of you. It sounds sequential, but it’s messy in practice, and that’s okay. The point is that acceptance is something you arrive at by going through the feeling, not by bypassing it.
For six and a half years, a townhouse never really felt like home for Elizabeth. No decorating. No investment. Just a physical space she occupied while some part of her waited for her real life to start. Looking back, she can see what she couldn’t see then: she was secretly waiting to be rescued from her own life. The feelings hadn’t moved through; they had just been parked.
That moment of reckoning looks different for everyone. Sitting in a car on the way home from Thanksgiving, two little boys in the backseat and the interstate ahead, Marissa thought: I’m about to drive home to a house with no hope coming. No help. No change. This is now my life. She almost turned back. But she didn’t. And learning to face that reality rather than flee from it was where healing actually began.
The acceptance Amber describes in the four-step framework isn’t resignation. It’s not giving up on the idea that life can be good. It’s letting the truth of your current reality be real, so that the decisions you make from here are grounded in something solid. Solid ground starts with telling the truth about where you actually are.
Slow down before making big moves
When life is demanding constant adjustment, the natural instinct is to keep moving – to fix something, control something, do something that makes the uncertainty feel less like uncertainty. That impulse makes complete sense. The decisions you make while you’re still spinning, though, are not always your most reliable ones.
There are two kinds of change worth understanding here: Controlled change is the kind you initiate – you decide to switch jobs, you set the terms of a transition, you choose the direction you’re heading. Forced change is the other kind. Papers served. A phone call that changes everything. A goodbye that turned out to be permanent. When change has been thrust on you, your brain is running mostly on emotion and response rather than logic and long-term thinking. The decisions you make from that place deserve a buffer, which is something Marissa speaks to directly from her own experience.
This is why there’s longstanding wisdom that widows shouldn’t sell their houses in the first year. It’s not that moving is wrong. It’s that the version of yourself making that call three months in is operating with a narrower field of vision than the version of yourself who’s had twelve months to breathe and process.
When you’re deep in it, the options in front of you look like the only options. What felt impossible from inside that season often looks completely different from twelve months out – not because the circumstances changed, but because you did. A little time, a little distance, and someone else’s perspective can open up solutions that were there the whole time but invisible from where you were standing.
Every decision in a solo parent’s life is connected to several others in ways that aren’t always visible when you’re carrying everything alone. Small moves ripple. That’s not a reason to be paralyzed. It’s a reason to slow down just enough to see the whole board.
This season is real life, not a waiting room
One of the sadder traps in solo parenting is the belief that this season doesn’t fully count. That you’re somewhere temporary. That the real life – the good life, the settled life – is still ahead, waiting for the circumstances to change. And so you live lightly, make no commitments, don’t decorate, don’t invest, don’t let yourself want too much.
Those years nearly slipped by for Marissa while she told herself she’d be happy when things looked different. What was wrong with those five years? she asks now. Were they chump change? The answer was no. They were some of the most formative, meaningful years of her life. And she almost missed them.
The shift came for Elizabeth through a house. Six years of renting the same space, not making it home, not making it hers until she finally asked: what am I waiting on? Nobody’s coming to do this for me. So she bought a house. Not because the big picture was figured out. Not because life had resolved itself. But because she made a next step, a deliberate one, and claimed her own life rather than handing it to circumstances that weren’t arriving.
This season, hard as it is, is a pivot point. You’re not the same person you were when you started. You know things now that you didn’t know then. And maybe for the first time, you have the chance to ask honestly: with everything I’ve learned, what would I actually build? That question, asked from a place of hard-won wisdom, is not a small one. It might be one of the most important ones you ever ask.
Finding Your Footing When the Map Is Gone
Building a new life plan doesn’t start with a spreadsheet or a five-year vision board. It starts with something smaller and harder: telling the truth about where you actually are.
If you’re in the early weeks or months, the most important thing is to feel it. Accept that this is real. Resist the urge to bolt from the feeling into fixing, because the decisions you make while you’re still running tend to cost more than the ones you make when you’ve stood still long enough to see clearly.
If you’re further along, the invitation is different. Start to notice what you’ve been waiting on. Notice where you’ve been holding yourself at arm’s length from your own life. Then make one next step. Not the whole plan. One move that’s yours.
And whatever stage you’re in: find your people. Not because you’re weak, but because no one figures this out alone. The community of people who understand this from the inside is the most valuable resource you will find in this season. Don’t try to reason through a life rebuild by yourself. You weren’t designed to carry it solo.
You’re not waiting for something to rescue you. You already are the one doing it.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Becoming Mom and Dad: How God Fathers Through Single Mothers by Marissa Lee
- The 4 Tasks of Mourning
- Chip Dodd
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