This piece is written in a composite first-person voice, reflecting the experiences of single mothers who have raised their children to adulthood. Names and identifying details are illustrative.
What I Wish I’d Known Twenty Years Ago
My youngest left for college this fall. For the first time in twenty-two years, I am in a house that doesn’t contain my children. I did not expect this to feel the way it feels — which is complicated, and full, and something I don’t quite have words for yet.
Twenty years is long enough that I can say things with certainty that I could not have said from inside it. So that’s what I’ll do.
The Children Are Okay
I know this is what everyone told you and you didn’t believe it and you won’t believe me either if you’re in year one. That’s fine. Say it somewhere — “the children are okay” — and let it sit there like something you’re leaving for later, for when you’re ready to receive it.
My children are adults now. They have their own lives, their own problems, their own particular beauty and difficulty. What they are not is destroyed by growing up the way they grew up.
They remember things I’ve forgotten and have forgotten things I thought would mark them permanently. They carry some things I wish they didn’t have to carry. They also carry a kind of groundedness — a comfort with imperfection, a familiarity with things not going according to plan — that I have come to believe they wouldn’t have in the same way if things had been different.
One of my children, the one I worried about most, is the most resilient person I know. I would not have predicted this. I predicted the opposite.
The Thing I Spent the Most Energy on Was Not the Thing That Mattered
I spent enormous energy in the early years on how we appeared. On whether we were okay by external measures. On whether I was doing enough, giving enough, compensating enough for the shape of our family.
Almost none of that mattered.
What mattered: that I showed up, even when I was depleted. That I told them the truth at the level they could handle at each age. That there was a table we came back to, a routine that held, a sense that no matter what happened in the world, this house was where we lived and I was here. The specific details of how we handled the school projects and the birthday parties and the holiday schedules — all of that fell away. The presence stayed.
The Grief I Didn’t Know I Was Carrying
Somewhere in the middle years — maybe around year ten or twelve — I realized I was still grieving something I had thought I’d finished grieving. Not the marriage, or not just the marriage. The life I had imagined before any of this happened. The future I had been building toward. The version of things where I had a partner and a different kind of family and things that felt, from the outside, easier.
That grief did not resolve at year one. It resolved gradually, over years, in therapy and in conversations and in one relationship that helped me understand something I’d needed to understand. But it was there longer than I knew it was there.
If you are carrying something that you thought you’d let go of and you haven’t, that is not failure. Some things take the time they take.
What I Know About the Men Who Came and Went
Some of my children met people I dated. Most of those people are not in our lives anymore. I was careful — more careful than I gave myself credit for in those years — but I made mistakes. Introduced someone too soon once. Held on to someone too long another time.
What I know now: the introductions that mattered most were not the relationships I thought were serious but turned out not to be. The person who influenced my children most was the one I wasn’t expecting, for reasons I couldn’t have predicted.
Also: my children have opinions about this period of their childhood that differ from my memory of it. That’s been one of the more humbling discoveries of the adult years — hearing what they actually experienced during times I thought I was protecting them. I recommend the conversation. It is not always comfortable, and it is worth having.
What Single Parenting Built That Wouldn’t Have Been Built Otherwise
I am not going to tell you single parenting was a gift. It was a circumstance. Circumstances shape people, and some of what mine shaped in me I’d change if I could, and some of it I’ve come to be grateful for in the complicated way that you’re grateful for things that cost you something real.
What it built: I know what I’m capable of in a way I would not have known if I hadn’t had to find out. I have a relationship with my children that was forged in a specific way — not better than other parent-child relationships, but distinctly ours, shaped by the particular texture of our years together. I have a life that is genuinely mine, not a compromise between what I wanted and what someone else needed. That life cost something. It is also real.
What I Would Say to Someone in Year One Today
You are going to do this. Not perfectly — I never did it perfectly and I am still here and so are my children. But you are going to do it.
The thing that feels most impossible right now is going to be something you’ve done so many times that it becomes ordinary. The first solo school pickup. The first Christmas. The first time a parent at school asked where your husband was and you had to find the words. You will do it so many times it will become something you can do.
The years go fast in a way you can’t appreciate from inside them. This year is hard. The year after is somewhat less hard. By year five you are different from who you are now, and by year ten you are different again, and by twenty — if your story looks anything like mine — you will be sitting somewhere, maybe in an empty house, surprised by how full you feel despite the quiet.
I could not have predicted this at year one. But it’s where I am.