You already know something is wrong before you can name it. It’s not just the circumstances. It’s the feeling underneath them: that you are holding too much, that the ground you’re standing on isn’t solid, and that no matter how hard you work to get things under control, the steadiness you’re looking for keeps moving just out of reach.
You wake up already behind. The news is unsettling. Your child is asking questions you don’t know how to answer. Work is unpredictable. Money is tight. And somewhere underneath all of it is the quiet weight of doing this without a partner, navigating a life that doesn’t come with a roadmap and rarely slows down long enough to let you catch your breath.
Elizabeth Cole, a single mom and co-host of the Solo Parent podcast, described her own experience this way: she said it felt like standing in a house where an earthquake is happening constantly, everything rumbling and shifting, never knowing when the roof might cave in.
It’s an honest picture of what this season can feel like.
In this conversation, Robert Beeson, Founder and 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 and a single mom of two, to talk through something that doesn’t get said enough: stability isn’t something you find out there in the world. It’s something you build from the inside out, even when everything around you is still in motion.
This episode is for the solo parent who is white-knuckling their way through an uncertain season and wondering if they’ll ever feel grounded again.
Solo parenting already asks a lot. Add a chaotic world on top of it and the weight can feel impossible to describe. There’s the helplessness of watching things spiral while still being the only one holding everything together at home. There’s the exhaustion of showing up fully for your kids when you’re running on empty yourself. There’s the frustration of reaching for things that should bring comfort and finding they don’t quite work. And there’s the particular loneliness of facing a real, pressing crisis with no one to call on at the end of the day.
What this conversation keeps circling back to is the question underneath all of it: is it possible to feel steady again, even before the circumstances change?
Key Insights from This Episode
- Unprocessed grief keeps you stuck, but naming your feelings can turn them into stepping stones forward.
- Inner stability starts with stillness, not solutions, and requires plugging back into a grounding source.
- Controlling what you can, through small anchors, routines, and community, creates real stability even when everything else remains uncertain.
Unprocessed Grief Keeps You Stuck, But Naming Your Feelings Can Turn Them Into Stepping Stones Forward
One of the quieter, harder truths of solo parenting is this: you’re often expected to keep building while you’re still in the middle of losing. A new life has to get constructed, groceries have to be bought, a child has to be raised, while you’re still carrying the weight of what fell apart, or maybe what you never even had.
Elizabeth talked about this with real vulnerability. Early in her solo parenting journey, she was trying to move forward while holding tightly to the life she’d lost. She hadn’t fully grieved it, so she couldn’t fully accept that it was over. And without that acceptance, she couldn’t actually build what was next. She described feeling frozen, unable to create new possibilities for herself and her son Jax because the grief she hadn’t processed was quietly blocking the road.
Amber put language to what that weight actually feels like. She described grief as bricks in a backpack: sadness, fear, overwhelm, anxiety, all the feelings that pile up when there’s no space or time to deal with them. She said she just kept going for a long time, never stopping to figure out what was pulling her down. It wasn’t until she began to pause and name what she was actually carrying that things began to shift. When she allowed herself to say, “I’m sad, and this loss is real,” those same heavy feelings became something she could stand on. They stopped being a wall and started becoming a path.
The grief process is long and nonlinear, and it rarely looks graceful. Elizabeth named something that doesn’t get talked about enough: the fear of stepping into your grief because you’re worried you might never come out, or that it will slowly become your entire identity. What this conversation makes clear is that the feelings don’t disappear when you ignore them. They just get heavier. But when you name them, they lose some of their power.
Inner Stability Starts With Stillness, Not Solutions, and Requires Plugging Back Into a Grounding Source
When the ground is shaking, the instinct is to do something. Scroll. Eat. Stay busy. Fill the silence with noise. Robert described this well. In his most chaotic seasons, he turned to coping habits that made him feel briefly better and ultimately worse. None of them ever got him past the starting line. They just kept him circling.
What actually helped, and what he says he still practices years later, was learning to get still. He used a simple but striking image to describe it: a lamp doesn’t produce light on its own. The light comes from the electricity it’s plugged into. Stillness, prayer, meditation, whatever that looks like for you, is the act of plugging back in. Without it, the bulb burns out.
Amber described what that looked like for her practically. When her home felt chaotic and overwhelming, she would walk outside and sit three feet past her front door. Just far enough to breathe. She would pray, notice what was actually in front of her: a tree, the temperature of the air, the sun. She let those small, real things remind her that something steady existed. That simple ritual was, in her words, absolute life.
Elizabeth shared a similar rhythm. During a particularly hard stretch, she walked the same neighborhood path every morning and evening for three to four months. It sounds small, but she said it gave her something that felt safe and predictable when nothing else did. That path became a place where she could breathe, feel grateful for what she saw, and eventually start dreaming again. The steadiness of it opened something in her that the chaos had closed down.
Robert also spoke honestly about the role of faith in his own grounding. He described the 23rd Psalm coming alive for him in a way it never had before during that season. The shift in the text from talking about God to talking directly to God was where he found the most grounding. Not because it solved anything externally, but because it reminded him that he wasn’t alone in it.
Inner stability doesn’t come from controlling what’s happening around you. It comes from returning, again and again, to something that holds you.
Controlling What You Can, Through Small Anchors, Routines, and Community, Creates Real Stability Even When Everything Else Remains Uncertain
The conversation took a very grounded turn when Elizabeth asked Amber to get practical. Amber had shared that she was dealing with a real health crisis: she had discovered she had severe anemia and had no health insurance to cover the cost of treatment. It wasn’t a hypothetical problem. It was urgent, immediate, and expensive.
Amber walked through what she actually did. First, she let herself feel the fear instead of pushing it away. She admitted she had avoided getting tested for months because she already suspected the result and didn’t want to face what it would mean. Once she finally got tested and the news was confirmed, she stopped trying to solve everything at once. She called her sister. She talked to God. She told the people around her. And almost immediately, she described feeling less alone. That shift, from isolation to connection, was itself a form of stability.
She then took one concrete step: she researched a community healthcare clinic that could verify her lab results and provide affordable treatment. She didn’t solve the whole problem. She just identified the next step and took it. And she said that having a path forward, even an imperfect one, brought a sense of hope.
Robert reflected on this and talked about the power of creating anchors. Predictability, he explained, is one of the most stabilizing forces available to solo parents, both for themselves and for their kids. Praying with his daughters every morning before school was one of those anchors. Getting still was another. These weren’t grand solutions. They were small, repeatable acts that gave him a place to return to when everything else felt out of control.
Amber pointed to the concept of habit stacking from the book “Atomic Habits” as a practical way to get started. Her personal example: every morning she drinks coffee. That’s going to happen no matter what. So she linked it to reading her Bible. First the coffee, then the Bible. Two things, done in sequence, consistently. It’s not complicated, but it’s reliable, and reliability is what stability is made of.
Both Robert and Amber were also clear that community isn’t optional. Reaching out, asking for help, letting people in, these aren’t signs of weakness. They’re anchors of their own. You are not supposed to carry all of this alone. And recognizing that is part of finding your footing.
A Closing Word for the Solo Parent Who Is Holding On
If you are in a season where nothing feels steady, this is what this conversation keeps coming back to: stability is not waiting for you on the other side of better circumstances. It’s something you build quietly, in small ways, right where you are.
You name what you’re carrying. You step outside and breathe. You walk the same path until it feels safe. You ask for help. You stack one small habit on top of another. None of those things will stop the world from being uncertain, but they will give you a place to return to when it gets loud. And that place, quiet and small as it might seem, is where stability actually lives.
You are not alone in this. God sees you, and so does this community.
