Most solo parents carry a version of the same fear. Not the loud, urgent kind, but the slow-burning one. The worry that what’s missing in your home will leave a mark on your kids that outlasts everything you’ve poured in. That the instability, the disrupted routines, the absent parent, the financial stress, the years of just trying to hold it together will somehow cost your children something you can never pay back. You love them fiercely. You show up. And still the question finds you in the quiet moments…
Is the gap going to define them?
Andy Marshall grew up with every reason to become a cautionary tale. Abuse, instability, a mother lost to alcoholism, siblings who disappeared one by one. He was sleeping in unlocked cars on the streets of Memphis by the time he was twelve. Today he’s built a business empire, been inducted into the Boys and Girls Club Hall of Fame, and is running for county mayor. His story doesn’t erase the hard parts. But it reframes what they can become.
This conversation won’t take that fear away entirely. But it might change the story you’re telling yourself about what’s possible for your kids.
About This Episode
In this episode, Robert Beeson, Founder and CEO of Solo Parent, and Elizabeth Cole, single parent and one of the core voices of the Solo Parent community, sit down with Andy Marshall, founder and owner of Puckett’s Grocery and Restaurant, a beloved Middle Tennessee institution that has grown into a regional empire with over 550 employees. Andy currently serves on multiple community boards, is a Boys and Girls Club Hall of Fame inductee, and is a candidate for Williamson County Mayor. But before any of that, he was a kid navigating one of the most chaotic, painful, and defining childhoods you’ll hear described. His story, told with humility and surprising grace, is a conversation about what it means to grow up in a solo-parent home and come out the other side not broken, but built.
The fears Andy’s story speaks into are the ones solo parents don’t always say out loud. The guilt of not being able to give your kids everything they need. The ache of watching your child navigate something hard and not being able to fix it. The question of whether the people and experiences filling the gaps in your home are actually enough. And underneath all of it, the longing to know that a difficult chapter doesn’t have to write the whole story.
Key Insights from This Episode:
- Children are shaped not only by what they have at home but by the people outside it who choose to see them.
- Routine and predictability are not just practical tools. For kids in unstable homes, they are forms of love.
- A hard childhood does not have to become a tragic story. In the right hands, it becomes a foundation.
Children Are Shaped Not Only by What They Have at Home but by the People Outside It Who Choose to See Them
Andy Marshall grew up in Memphis in a home that, by most definitions, was falling apart. His father was largely absent. His mother remarried a man whose cruelty was both physical and relentless. His older brother eventually refused to come back from a summer visit to their dads. His sister, the one who had quietly made sure he had food and felt safe, ran away at age 14. By the time Andy was ten years old, he was largely on his own in an abusive home.
What kept him from disappearing into that story were the men and women who chose to show up for him anyway.
In Louisville, Andy met a kid named Troy shooting basketball in an alley. Troy’s father, Mr. Kurtz, didn’t hesitate to bring Andy into their world. When Andy wanted to play Pee Wee football and his stepfather said it was too expensive, Mr. Kurtz handed him a full bag of equipment. Andy brought it home and his stepfather still said no. So Andy carried the gear upstairs, threw it out his bedroom window, and dropped down after it. It wasn’t defiance for its own sake. Andy knew, even at eight years old, that football was something good for him. It was structure, belonging, a place to put his energy and his drive. He was going to find his way to that football field, one way or another. That instinct, to recognize what was healthy and pursue it with everything he had, was the same one that would eventually build a business empire. Mr. Kurtz drove him to practice every day. Fed him most days too.
Then there were the Youngs. Another friend named Troy and his family became another safe place. When Andy’s home turned dangerous, the Youngs were where he went. Mr. Young wasn’t a man of many words, Andy said, but he saw through him and just took him in. When things reached an emotional and physical breaking point with Andy’s stepfather, it was Troy who pulled the man off of him.
And there was the Boys and Girls Club, where staff and volunteers asked Andy if he’d done his homework, told him he was smart, gave him structure and sports and a reason to come back tomorrow. For a kid who had been told through circumstance that he didn’t matter much, those voices were quietly reshaping what he believed about himself.
Andy reflected that even at his lowest, there was always somebody there to pick him up. Always. He didn’t have language for it at the time. He just knew certain places felt safer than his own home, and certain people made him feel like he was worth showing up for.
For solo parents, that’s both a comfort and a real invitation. You cannot be everything to your kids, and you were never meant to be. But you can be intentional about who surrounds them. Andy noted that finding those role models, people who reflect what’s missing at home and will speak something true into your child, might be one of the most meaningful things you can do. Not because you’re not enough. But because community has always been part of how kids find their way.
Routine and Predictability Are Not Just Practical Tools. For Kids in Unstable Homes, They Are Forms of Love
There’s a moment in this conversation that stops you. Andy is describing the first weeks after he moved in with his father and stepmother, Dinky, after years of chaos, abuse, and nights sleeping in unlocked cars on the streets of Memphis. And what moved him wasn’t some grand gesture. It was a meal time. A made bed. Having household chores.
Andy said that nobody had ever asked him if he was ready for school tomorrow. Not once. The structure that most kids resist, the do-your-homework routines and the dinner-is-at-six expectations, felt like a lifeline to him. He thrived inside that routine because he finally knew what was expected. He knew what came next. And knowing what came next felt, for the first time, like safety.
Dinky later told Andy he was the easiest of all five of their children. He explained why: he had wanted that routine so badly that once he had it, he did everything in his power to protect it. He made his bed. He showed up to breakfast. He did not want to hear that it wasn’t working out. The routine wasn’t a burden. It was the thing he’d been hungry for his whole childhood.
Elizabeth made the connection that solo parents often need to hear: predictability brings stability. When life has been unstable, children don’t just tolerate structure. They need it. It is a form of regulation that the nervous system reaches for. And for a solo parent who is already stretched thin and tempted to let things slide out of exhaustion or guilt, Andy’s story is a gentle reminder that the boring consistency of daily life isn’t a low bar. It’s actually one of the highest things you can offer.\
You don’t have to build a perfect home. You have to build a predictable one. Those aren’t the same thing, and the difference matters enormously.
A Hard Childhood Does Not Have to Become a Tragic Story. In the Right Hands, It Becomes a Foundation
At thirteen years old, Andy sat at a kitchen table while his stepfather slammed it with both hands and delivered an ultimatum: either Andy goes, or he goes. His mother, struggling with her own pain and addiction, looked at her son and asked if he had somewhere he could stay.
He said yes, even though he wasn’t sure it was true.
What followed was a phone call to his biological father where Andy performed composure he did not feel, telling his stepfather everything was arranged when it wasn’t, buying himself enough time and grace to eventually land in the one place that became the foundation for everything that came after. It wasn’t a clean rescue. It was a kid, shaped by years of hard living, who had developed enough resilience, resourcefulness, and quiet moral clarity to navigate an impossible moment.
Andy closed the podcast conversation by saying something that deserves to land: he does not look back on his life as a tragedy. He looks back on all the ways God placed different people in his path to get him to the place he was meant to be. From the outside looking in, he acknowledged, it looked bad. But from the inside looking out, it built him into the man he became.
Elizabeth reflected on something that comes up again and again with the solo parents she walks alongside: the fear that the gaps in their children’s lives will define those children. Andy’s story doesn’t erase that fear. But it reframes it. Kids are resilient, Elizabeth said, and sometimes the very thing that is the pressure, the struggle, the loss, is the thing that sets them up to do something remarkable.
That’s not a promise that suffering is purposeful. It’s something more honest: that suffering, met with even one person who believes in you, can become something other than damage. It can become depth. Character. The kind of inner knowing that no comfortable childhood can fully manufacture.
Andy Marshall is proof. And his story is worth sitting with.
A Word Before You Close This Page
If you are in a season where the weight of solo parenting feels like it’s pressing in from every side, if you’re looking at your kids and counting the things they don’t have instead of everything they do, this conversation is for you in the quietest, most personal way.
Your child does not need a perfect home. They need you, consistently showing up. They need at least one person outside your home who sees them and calls something good out of them. They need enough structure that tomorrow feels like something they can count on. And they need a parent who hasn’t given up on the belief that this story, their story, is still being written.
The gaps are real. The struggle is real. And none of that is the final word.
Andy’s story doesn’t end with survival. It ends with reconciliation. Through God’s grace, he found his way back to his mother, extending love and grace toward a woman who, by any measure, hadn’t been able to give him what he needed. That kind of forgiveness doesn’t come from having an easy life. It comes from having a settled one, built on the shoulders of people who saw something worth saving in a kid who had every reason to believe otherwise.
Andy put it simply: God kept pursuing him, even when no one else did.
