Tag: single mum

The Day I Saw Myself in the Future

A therapist once told me I was ‘passively suicidal’.
I wasn’t actively trying to die anymore, but I wasn’t really trying to live either. Just existing in the quietest way, moving through the days like smoke, ticking boxes, showing up only enough to keep going.

There was no vision, no reach. I wasn’t hoping for anything. I wasn’t growing. I wasn’t even wanting to.

I never made plans for the future. Not because I didn’t care about one, but because I genuinely couldn’t see myself in it. I didn’t believe I would be there. I wasn’t in the picture.

Then recently, someone asked me,
“What would make you quit your job?”

Without thinking, I said,
“Nothing. My only goal over the next 5 years is to find and build a home for my daughter and me”.

My voice cracked and I didn’t know why. I didn’t realise what I’d said until later. I hadn’t said anything about endings. For the first time in so long, I had a goal. A shape. A horizon.
A stretch of time that I was planning to be alive in.
I saw myself there.

Not just enduring, but building.

Not just surviving but choosing to stay.

That moment stays with me.

Now, when I talk about the future, my voice catches. It feels tender, fragile, like I’m speaking of something sacred. I want to see her grow. I want to meet the woman she becomes. I want to watch her shape the world and shape herself.

I want to build something so gentle and grounded that she never has to feel the way I once did.
I want her to know comfort like I knew ache. To feel home not as a place but a state of being. To never wonder whether she belongs.

Sometimes I worry.
That these words might be misread. That if my parents saw them, they might think I’m blaming them for the way I once felt. Saying they didn’t provide that for me.

But I’m not.
They loved me with everything they had.
Pain doesn’t always ask permission though. Sometimes it just arrives.

Now my reason to stay is almost 6 years old. She runs barefoot through my heart and paints the sky with her joy. She is my reason. My turning point.

But lately, very quietly, another reason has begun to emerge.

It’s not loud. It doesn’t demand much.
Just a whisper.

What if I lived for myself too?

Not just for her.
Not just to protect or provide.
For the woman I’m still becoming. For the dreams I buried before they even had a name. For the version of me I never thought I’d meet.

She saved me, but now I want to show up in the world. Not just for her, but with her.

Not from the sidelines. Not only as a witness.

As someone still alive in her own story.

A whisper of what could have been

I listen to them play, screams of “Dad!” and laughs ringing through the house. Hearing him teach her that sometimes it’s okay to laugh when someone falls and comfort her when she’s bumped her knee.

There’s no negative air between us, no more walking on eggshells, we just appreciate what both of us are doing for our child. She is the soul focus in our life.

6 years ago today I moved back to my parents home. It was never my family home as I’d never lived here. With both of my parents choosing careers that fortunately provided living accommodations, there had never really been a “family home” as such. Yet there I was, in a position I had never dreamed of being in, as I had no where else to turn. I had lost the home I believed I was building. I had lost my best friend, my partner. I was forced to return to a country I had believed I wanted to leave, had accepted I may never live in again, because I was so certain this was the first move to the rest of our lives.

I didn’t want to come back on my Dad’s birthday, I was worried I would taint the day. If you had told me in that moment that 6 years later we’d all be sitting around a table eating pizza together with our daughter I would have laughed in your face. I was broken coming home, my heart had never felt heavier, I’d spent the entire plane journey from Australia, all 1235 minutes of it crying to myself. Why had I not advocated for myself sooner? How dare I let anyone treat me the way they both had? Why wasn’t I good enough? What did she have that I didn’t? Why did’t he value me enough after 4 years to even try avoid hurting my feelings? Nothing had ever hurt me as much as that.

Now I sit and listen to them laugh. There are moments where I think what if things had been different and she’d been able to experience his love every day of her life, that’s what I mourn now. Not our relationship and what that would have meant, but what it could have been for her.