Most solo parents have no idea how strong they actually are. They are too deep in the daily grind of keeping everything together to step back and see it. And underneath all of that strength is a particular exhaustion, one that does not come from the work of parenting alone. It comes from the quiet, private rituals you return to at the end of a long day, the ones that feel like relief but somehow leave you more depleted than before. That tension is real. And it is far more common among solo parents than anyone talks about.
The good news is that recognizing the cycle is not a sign that something is broken in you. It is often the beginning of something genuinely better. This episode is a conversation about that journey, told by someone who has lived it from the inside out.
Robert Beeson, Founder and CEO of Solo Parent, and Elizabeth Cole, single parent and co-host, sit down with Katrina Morriss, a single mom of two boys, a licensed mental health nurse practitioner, and one of Solo Parent’s earliest group members. Katrina joined the community in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and has been a steady, formative voice in shaping what Solo Parent’s online groups look and feel like today.
Her story is not a highlight reel. It is the kind of honest, hard-won account that actually changes the way you see your own life. Together, the three of them explore what it looks like to move from numbing out to showing up fully for yourself and your kids.
If you are parenting solo, you know the feeling. The kids are finally in bed. The house is quiet. And instead of rest, you feel a kind of restlessness that has nowhere to go.
So you reach. Maybe it is a glass of wine. A scroll through your phone. A familiar show on Netflix. Gummy bears at midnight. Work you do not actually need to do tonight. None of these feel like a crisis. Most of them do not even feel like a problem. They just feel like the only thing available when the weight of the day has nowhere to land.
But what happens when the very things you reach for to get through are the same things keeping you stuck? What happens when the relief strategy is also the thing making you more tired, more disconnected, and less present for the moments that actually matter?
That is the real conversation in this episode. Not shame about coping. Not a list of things to stop doing. But an honest look at the cycle, why it forms, what it costs, and what becomes possible when you are finally willing to step out of it.
Key Insights from This Episode:
- Numbing and restoring are not the same thing.
- The known hell feels safer than the unknown heaven.
- Presence for your kids is the fuel, not just the goal.
Numbing and Restoring Are Not the Same Thing
Katrina described the early years of her solo season with a clarity that is hard to sit with: exhaustion that did not end, a body that kept getting sick, a cup that was constantly dry. She was working full-time, in nursing school, raising two boys, working through the fallout of a broken marriage, and doing everything she could just to get to the next day. She said she was using everything she could lean on except God, and she was being honest about that.
The nightly ritual looked familiar. After the boys went to bed, she would settle in with wine, a bag of gummy bears, and The Office on repeat. Not because she wanted to fall apart, but because she desperately did not want to feel the thing waiting for her in the silence: the utter aloneness of nighttime as a single parent.
She explained it plainly: her kids were there, but they could not process adult pain with her. The kind of emotional connection she was starving for simply was not available at the end of those days. So she numbed. And then she woke up the next morning sick, tired, and ashamed, and started the whole thing over again.
Robert noted that he recognized this pattern completely in himself. Wine and gummy worms were his version. Not because he considered it a problem, but because nothing was manifesting dramatically enough to force the question. He described it as just taking the edge off. That slow drift is part of what makes this cycle so hard to name.
The turning point for Katrina did not come from a confrontation or a rock-bottom moment anyone else could see from the outside. It came on a morning in April 2020 when she woke up shaky, nauseous, and running on no real sleep. She knew she had overdone it the night before, more wine than usual, more gummy bears than usual, staying up too late with the TV running just to avoid the silence, and her body was telling her clearly what her mind had been avoiding. Something broke open in that moment. She described hearing it almost like a warning: keep going this way and you will die. Not a dramatic physical death, necessarily, but the slow kind, where you are still walking around but your life has stopped meaning anything.
The question this episode opens up is not whether you are struggling. It is whether the thing you are reaching for at the end of the day is actually giving you anything back, or whether it is quietly borrowing against your future.
The Known Hell Feels Safer Than the Unknown Heaven
Elizabeth brought up something one of her clients had said that landed hard: a known hell is better than an unknown heaven. That phrase captures something most people in survival mode never say out loud, but feel constantly. The familiar coping strategy, however destructive, feels like solid ground. The alternative is uncertain, and uncertainty when you are already exhausted feels like a risk you cannot afford.
Katrina described the version of this she lived with directly. She had a mentor, Stephanie, who kept reaching out to tell her about support groups. Katrina knew what Celebrate Recovery was. She was not uninformed. But she told Stephanie plainly: I do not want to go. I am tired of trying and nothing is working. She remembered the paralytic in John 5, the man Jesus asks if he wants to be healed. She shared that Theo Von, the comedian who has spoken openly about his own recovery, talked about that passage and how sometimes your honest answer to that question is no. Not because you want to suffer, but because trying again and failing feels worse than staying still.
There is also the grief side of this. Elizabeth shared that when she began letting go of alcohol as a coping strategy, she genuinely had to mourn it. Her counselor, Lori, told her that grieving made sense, because the substance had been there for her when nothing else was. Leaving it behind meant asking hard questions: who am I without this? Can I still be fun? Can I still connect with people?
Katrina said her first heartbreak after getting sober brought all of this back. She had never navigated real emotional pain without her coping strategies and she described feeling genuinely unmoored. The wine had not been stability, she knew that, but it had felt like stability. And without it, the emotions felt uncontrolled and overwhelming.
What helped Katrina was not having a plan. It was one small negotiation at a time. What if I walk on the treadmill instead of lying in bed? What if I listen to a podcast instead of watching TV? She started listening to Tony Evans every night, drawn in by the passion and the emotional presence she was actually craving. She went on hikes and fishing trips with her boys, choosing movement and risk over the temptation of the couch. None of it was a strategy. All of it was survival.
The other piece was community. Katrina found Solo Parent’s online groups and noted something specific: other recovery spaces she had tried could not hold the weight of what it means to do this as a single parent. The sobriety journey of a solo parent, she said, is completely different from doing it when there is someone else in the house, someone who can encourage you, carry some of the weight, step in with the kids when you are running on empty, and remind you that you are not doing it alone.
Presence for Your Kids Is the Fuel, Not Just the Goal
Katrina was asked what has kept her sober through the hardest seasons, through a first heartbreak, through losing her mom, through the grind of long nights when old habits feel close. Her answer was immediate: the moments with her boys that she would never trade.
She talked about a moment with her oldest son. A couple of years ago, he came to her and told her he did not want to live anymore. She described sitting with him in that, not panicking, not immediately trying to fix it, but drawing on everything she had learned about attuning to someone in pain. She told him she understood what it felt like to not want to be alive. She held him. He cried. And he felt met.
She was honest about what that moment required of her. Had she still been in her old patterns, she said, she is not sure her son would have come to her at all. And even if he had, she does not think she would have been able to stay present with him in it. She would have gone into fix-it mode, or managed him from a distance, rather than being fully there.
That moment is what she calls an unregrettable moment. She said she has started measuring life by this framework: regrettable versus unregrettable. The exhaustion that came after sitting with her son that night was real. She went to bed completely poured out. But there was no shame attached to it. It was the good kind of empty.
She was also clear that this is not a comparison of which path is easier. Both are hard. The life in addiction is hard and exhausting and full of regret. The life in recovery is also hard and exhausting. But one of them has moments like that one with her son. And that is the difference.
Robert brought up something important near the end of this conversation: the danger of a new coping strategy replacing an old one. He named work as his version. Productivity is socially rewarded and does not look like a problem from the outside. Katrina agreed that the signal to watch for is when you start missing connection moments with your kids, when your body starts tensing and not settling, when you notice you are back in survival mode rather than actually present. That awareness is the ongoing work.
You Have Not Run Out of Time
Toward the end of the conversation, Katrina talked about bringing your full, transparent heart to God. Not the cleaned-up version. Not the composed version. The version that is angry and confused and exhausted and just needs to say: I cannot do this anymore. Come get me.
Robert pointed to Job, to Jesus in the garden, to David’s psalms of lament. These are not examples of polished faith. They are examples of honesty so complete that it becomes its own kind of surrender. And as Katrina shared, the night she finally said all of it to God without editing herself, she slept better than she had in years. Nothing about her circumstances had changed. But she had finally put it down.
If you are in the cycle right now, you are not behind. You have not missed your chance. One day at a time is not a cliche. It is the actual mechanism. Katrina was not planning to lose 75 pounds, finish a nursing program, and become a mental health nurse practitioner when she woke up sick and tired on that April morning in 2020. She was just planning not to drink that day.
You just have to do the next right thing. And then the one after that.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- The Voice of the Heart by Chip Dodd
- Tony Evans Podcast
