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Modelling Resilience for My Daughter
Living with awareness, not perfection
Single parenting is often spoken about in terms of strength. But what it actually asks for is awareness. Not perfection, but awareness.
It feels like building a road while still walking it, noticing each step as it forms beneath you.
This is my daughter’s birthday month, and for the first time, we will not be together on her birthday. I feel the joy of watching her doing life abroad, with the great feeling of missing her. I have the best memories of her birthdays. This year, I will let the days unfold while she celebrates far away, grateful for all that has brought us here.
There were decisions, responsibilities, and provision resting on one pair of shoulders. And there were moments when absence, her father leaving when she was eleven, became something we both had to learn to carry without letting it define the atmosphere of our lives.
Loss rarely arrives all at once. It settles slowly into the edges of ordinary days.
And still, something else was forming beneath it.
My daughter grew into independence earlier than expected. Not as an idea, but as lived experience. There was pain in that shaping, and also a strengthening: an inner knowing that what wounds a season does not have to wound a life.
