A day in the life of a Single Mama

Dear Single Mama,

Your morning starts when your children wake up. It should start when the alarm goes off, but children don’t believe in alarms. Or mercy. Or sleeping in.

By the time you’ve dropped the kids off at school, you’ve already lived a thousand lives, each one of them hard. Your make‑up isn’t done; you haven’t eaten; the house is a mess; and you’re running late. You’ve failed at every task you were meant to do and you will carry those failures around with you for the rest of the day.

You go work. Smile. Make small talk. Hit deadlines. You grind so that you can keep a roof over your heads and put food on the table. You’re not chasing dreams. You’re surviving a job you hate.

You know there will be no respite after work. If you are lucky, there will be a brief moment of joy with the kids; a silly moment during a dinner that isn’t healthy enough. The guilt will be your constant companion. You’ll wish you weren’t so tired. You’ll think about how much more fun you could be, should be, if only you had the strength.

All too soon it’s bedtime, and the anxiety will take over. Will they sleep? Will they fight it? How many more battles will you have to fight today?

And then the kids are finally asleep, and you collapse onto the couch. Everything and everyone has needed something from you today, and now you have nothing left to give. You stare at the TV, numb. The guilt creeps in immediately. You should be cleaning. Exercising. Doing something productive. Getting ahead for tomorrow. But you don’t. You can’t. You just sit there and let the screen swallow you whole.

You know you’ll regret it tomorrow. You’ll scold yourself for wasting time. And still, you sit. You stare too long. You go to bed too late. Your final failure of the day.

Your head hits the pillow and you’re gone. Maybe a few moments of worry slip in, regret, doubt, the usual chorus, but sleep eventually wins. You’re too tired to fight it. And tomorrow, before you’re ready, before you’ve recovered, it will all start again.

Me too, Single Mama. I feel it too. And within all the exhaustion and hopelessness, I hear the voice telling me it isn’t meant to be like this. Do you hear it too? The voice that tells you there must be more to life. That you, and the kids, deserve something more.

This is the story of how I found my more, Single Mama, and the story of how you will too. You are not alone and there is more out there. For you, for the kids and for the person that resides there, underneath it all, in your soul.

It will take time but you will get there. For now, for today, know that you are not alone. We are all tired, trying and feeling like we are failing. But this is not the story of how you failed. You didn’t sink. This is the story of how you swam an ocean. Welcome to Single Mama: Sink or Swim. The place where all mamas win. Read these pages and learn my journey so that you can take your own. There is no preaching here just a true raw account written by one Single Mama to another. Let’s swim together, Mama. Let’s take on the world and win.