On the life that was expected, the one we built instead, and what it actually required.
When I became a single mother, the life that was expected of me was already laid out.
Go to work to pay rent. Drop your son at nursery from four months old. Pick him up. Do it again. Every day. For the foreseeable future.
Make him dependent on food or stuff. Discipline through punishment and give recompenses. Make him follow soul-crushing rules. Do it again. Give a gold star at the end.
Meanwhile buy things you don’t need to fill gaps you can’t quite name. Tell yourself this is normal.
And watch a stranger grow up in your rented house who one day won’t even listen to you.
I looked at that and thought: seriously?
Not judgement. Just a question.
I kept watching it happen to people I knew. Intelligent, capable, loving people. And I couldn’t stop asking myself — are we not mentally capable of finding a more meaningful way?
Because it seemed less like a life and more like a system that needed feeding.
The system needed your labour. It needed your child’s compliance. It needed your spending to fill the gaps it created in you. It needed you tired enough not to question it and busy enough not to look for alternatives. And it delivered, in return, a version of security that felt more like a ceiling than a floor.
I am not saying the people living that life are wrong. I am saying I kept watching it and something in me kept refusing.
I didn’t have a plan
I didn’t have savings or a partner or anyone nodding me along. I just knew I wasn’t going to do it that way.
That knowing is not the same as knowing what to do instead. It is much more uncomfortable than that. It is standing at the edge of the expected path and feeling, very clearly, that you cannot walk down it, without having any idea what the alternative looks like yet.
Most people, at that point, talk themselves back onto the path. The uncertainty is too much. The social pressure is too much. The practical reality of being a single mother with no savings and no plan is too much.
I understand that. I felt all of it.
And I still couldn’t do it.
What it actually required
A few years on and it is my son’s twelfth birthday. As I write this, he is outside of any school on a school day, exploring the world and himself, and very much not a stranger. We built a life that feels good to us.
It didn’t require a miracle. It required a stubborn and steady refusal of the default.
It meant making decisions that looked irresponsible from the outside, repeatedly, over years. It meant tolerating being misunderstood by people whose opinion I cared about. It meant figuring things out without a template, which is slower and harder and lonelier than following one.
But it also meant that the life we ended up with is actually ours. Not the life the system laid out for us. Not the life that made sense to everyone else.
What I want for all of us
May all children liberate themselves from our burdens. May all parents realise they don’t have to transmit generational curses and that they have permission to build new from scratch.
May all of us find our way back to ourselves in all the noise we’ve been thrown in.
I have seen enough now to believe it is possible.