The holidays have a way of finding exactly what still hurts, whether this is your first holiday season as a solo parent or your tenth – and they always seem to ask more than you expected.
Not because you haven’t prepared, but because no amount of planning fully prepares you for the first time you open the ornament box solo, or the moment you realize your kid won’t be with you on Christmas morning. The season carries weight that shows up in ways you don’t expect, even years after you thought you’d made your peace with it. And the pressure to make it magical for your kids while managing your own grief, your budget, and a calendar that no longer looks the way it used to – that’s a lot to carry into the most wonderful time of the year.
The good news is that you can walk into this season with intention. Not perfection. Just intention.
Robert Beeson, Founder & CEO of Solo Parent, sits down with Elizabeth Cole, single parent, and Amber Fuller, a counselor with a Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy (MMFT) and single parent, for an honest conversation about what self-care actually looks like heading into the holidays as a solo parent. All three have lived these seasons – the grief, the loneliness, the unexpected joy – and they come to this conversation with hard-won perspective and practical wisdom to share.
The conversation covers the grief that the season stirs up – for those navigating divorce and co-parenting schedules, and for those carrying the deeper ache of an empty seat that will never be filled. It touches on finances, on expectations, on the small things your kids will actually remember. And it comes back, again and again, to one steady reminder: you are not in this alone.
Key Insights from this episode:
- Grief doesn’t follow a timeline and the holidays will remind you of that
- Managing expectations is the most practical form of holiday self-care
- The memories your kids carry aren’t made by the gifts – they’re made by the emotion attached to the moment
Grief Doesn’t Follow a Timeline and the Holidays Will Remind You of That
The first few holiday seasons as a solo parent can feel like an emotional ambush. One moment you’re putting up the tree, and the next you’re holding an ornament that reads “Our First Christmas Together” and trying to swallow the lump in your throat. That’s not weakness…it’s just grief doing what grief does.
Amber describes exactly that moment – tucking an ornament back into the box and just kept going, because the kids were right there and the tree needed to go up. There’s wisdom in knowing when to set something aside. But as she was quick to point out, setting it aside is not the same as getting rid of it. Grief stuffed down doesn’t disappear. It finds another way out, usually at the worst possible moment.
She put it this way: grief is like a pot of boiling water with the lid on. You can put the lid on grief for a season, especially when your kids need you present. But if you leave that lid on permanently with the burner still going, it will spill. The move isn’t to ignore it. The move is to turn the burner down, put the lid on temporarily, and come back to it when the kids are asleep.
Elizabeth took even longer before she let herself feel it. The first two years she went through the motions, kept her head down, poured everything into making the magic happen for her son. The third year, the grief finally broke through and she cried through the tree decorating, through the wrapping, through the goodbyes. And she found herself surprised by what she realized once the season was over – in numbing the sadness, she had been numbing the joy too. You don’t get to selectively feel only the good parts. When you numb one side, you numb the whole thing.
Grief doesn’t move in a straight line either. Both Amber and Robert, years past their divorces, still get blindsided. A commercial. A card tucked in a drawer. A kid announcing they won’t be home for Halloween this year, and the wave of emotion that comes out of nowhere in response. You haven’t moved backward if something still hits you. You’re not broken. The holidays are one of the hardest seasons for solo parents regardless of how long you’ve been at this, and there’s no timeline you’re supposed to be on.
And for those who lost a spouse to death, the grief is its own category entirely. The empty seat at the table isn’t logistical. It’s the kind of ache that doesn’t get filled by a new schedule or a new tradition. Carrying that alone, while also carrying your kids through their own loss, is something Elizabeth named with real tenderness: an unimaginable weight, and one that deserves to be acknowledged, not glossed over.
Managing Expectations Is the Most Practical Form of Holiday Self-Care
Once you’ve made room for the grief, the next thing that helps is getting honest about what this season can realistically look like – and releasing your grip on what it used to look like.
Managing expectations sounds clinical. What it actually means is: hold your plans loosely. Especially in the first year or two, when everything is still raw and the co-parenting schedule is new and you genuinely don’t know how the other person is going to respond. You need a plan, but not a plan so tight you can’t breathe when it changes.
Elizabeth’s practical wisdom was simple and specific. Look at the calendar now. Know which days you won’t have your kids and make a plan for those days in advance. Not because planning erases the pain, but because an empty day with no structure is a much harder thing to move through than a hard day with something on it. It could be a movie, a friend, a Solo Parent group that meets on Christmas night for exactly this reason. The plan doesn’t fix anything, it just gives you somewhere to put yourself.
That same principle applies to social obligations. You don’t have to go to everything. Robert talked about the freedom he wished he’d found sooner – the permission to say ‘no’ to gatherings that didn’t serve him, to stop filling in every slot just because he used to and/or felt obligated. Being selective isn’t antisocial, it’s simply protecting yourself.
Traditions are worth putting on the table too. Not to erase them, but to ask honestly which ones still fit and which ones need to be reimagined. Some will stay exactly as they were. Others will shift in ways you didn’t expect. Amber’s kids, now in their twenties, still make Christmas cookies with her every year – they held onto that one and weren’t letting go. But looking at Christmas lights together had quietly fallen away as they got older. So she went with a friend instead, convertible top down, blankets and apple cider, Christmas music on. It was its own good thing. Joy doesn’t always look the way it used to, and that’s not always a loss.
The financial piece is part of this too, and it’s real. Going from two incomes to one often changes what the holidays can look like, and pretending otherwise just creates a January full of credit card debt and regret. The episode points to a downloadable PDF in the show notes that walks through a practical holiday budget – but the posture beneath the budget is grace. You don’t have to send the photo cards if that’s not where you are right now. You don’t have to buy for everyone you used to buy for. Your words, a cheap card, a letter that actually says something real – those are not lesser gifts. In some ways they’re more.
The Memories Your Kids Carry Aren’t Made by the Gifts – They’re Made by the Emotion Attached to the Moment
Something Elizabeth shared about how memory actually works rethink the whole pressure around gifts. We don’t remember the moments that were most expensive or most elaborate. We remember the ones that felt like something – the ones with a strong emotion woven through them. That’s what makes a memory stick.
Robert came at this from his own experience. He talked about the pressure he used to feel to make every Christmas perfect – the right gifts, the right traditions, the right amount of magic – and what happened when he finally relaxed that grip. He started doing something small and specific each year: a Santa note written in a hand that didn’t look like his. His youngest daughter called him recently, in her mid-twenties now, still mystified by those notes. She still didn’t know how he’d done it. Of all the things from those Christmases, that’s the detail she asked him about years later. Not the gifts but the small, specific, creative thing he did to make it special for his girls..
The takeaway isn’t that the gifts don’t matter. It’s that you are not in a competition you can win by spending more. The thing your kid is going to remember as adults is probably not what was under the tree. It’s whether they felt something when they were with you.
Amber’s experience proves the point from a different angle: the imperfect moments count too. One Thanksgiving, fresh after her divorce, she wanted a gratitude circle – something meaningful, something connective. Her kids had nothing they felt grateful for. Understandably so. Their lives were in turmoil. She ended up crying at the table. It felt like a failure in the moment but ten years later, her family tells that story with laughter. It has become one of their memories, not because it was picture perfect, but because it was real and she was there, fully in it with them.
You don’t have to manufacture the perfect moment. Sometimes the moment that sticks is the one where everything went sideways and you were still there, still trying, still in it together. The pressure to get everything right is one of the heaviest things you’re carrying into this season. And you can set it down.
You’ve Already Shown Up
Getting to the end of October still standing, with kids to care for and a season coming that you know is going to ask a lot of you – that’s a lot to tackle!
The holidays are hard. Some years they’re harder than others. You may find yourself caught off guard by grief you thought you’d processed, or by loneliness that shows up in the middle of a crowded room, or by a changed schedule that reopens something you thought was healed. That doesn’t mean you’ve gone backward. It means you’re human, and the holidays have a particular way of touching the things that still hurt.
What this conversation keeps coming back to is this: you don’t have to do this perfectly, and you don’t have to do it alone. Make room for the grief. Hold your plans loosely. Focus less on what’s under the tree and more on what your kids will feel when they think back on this season years from now. And find your people – the ones who get it, the ones who will sit with you on the hard nights, the ones who won’t expect you to have it all together.
You’re going to make it through this season. And you’re going to make something meaningful in the middle of it.
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