No One Dreams of Doing It Alone: Single Parenting

I didn’t dream of doing it alone, but I learned how to do it powerfully!

Love to me, was never taught in a stable way. It came with low expectations, inconsistency, and disappointment. Never stable, never safe. In my mind, relationships whether friendships or romance were built on a fairytale idea of finally belonging somewhere, finally being wanted. Chasing love, I believed people when they said they loved me, that they would stay, that they wouldn’t leave. I was living life with a childlike understanding of love, shaped by trauma, abandonment, and being left behind.

That belief followed me into adulthood.

I became a mother at 27, something I had always wanted, I thought this was my moment: my family, my healing, my new beginning. But I quickly realized it would just be my son and me. Alone. Struggling. Trying to survive while carrying the weight of my past and the responsibility of an innocent life.

He didn’t just change my life…. he exposed it!

He became the one thing that shifted everything. He showed me who I was, someone who had spent years accepting mistreatment because I believed that’s what I deserved. That’s what I had been shown in my home. I wasn’t just learning how to be a mother, I was learning how to become someone who could break cycles that had followed the woman in my life for generations. And now I was terrified that while he was healing me, I might be failing him. That I might be passing down the very cycle I was trying to escape.

And then life kept testing me.

His father chose not to be present. My mother, my foundation in many ways, would commit suicide when he was 5 months old. A week before his first birthday, the man who raised me, my stepfather, died suddenly of a heart attack while in Vegas with a random woman. And I was left with fractured relationships, sisters who never truly accepted me or my child, as if we were a reminder of everything they wanted to erase. My life was pure grief and relationships that felt conditional at best.

For years, I lived in survival mode, hyper-focused on being the best mother I could be while silently trying to build the perfect family I never had for my son and for myself. But underneath it all, I was stuck in fight, flight, freeze…. I didn’t even realize I was frozen.

I questioned everything about myself. How could I be a good mother but feel so lost in every other part of my life? Why was I trusting, so naive, so disconnected from my own protection and peace?

And somewhere in that decade, while still trying to find love in all the wrong places, I became a mother again, to my daughter. Still single. Still healing. Still learning.

But something changed.

This space, BadassSoloMom, was born from that awakening. Not just to tell my story but to help other solo parents break cycles that rebuild identities and learn how to choose themselves without guilt.

Because this isn’t just about parenthood.

It’s about becoming whole again.