Solo parenting can be a beautiful journey, but it can also be incredibly challenging. When crises arise, single mothers can feel like they're battling something bigger than what they can see and touch. Whether it’s a family conflict, a health scare, or a financial struggle, mothers often find themselves in spiritual warfare. The devil loves to target mothers, and families. So in these moments, it is essential to leverage the strategies the Catholic Church gives us, to ward of

Raising a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) comes with unique challenges, especially when it comes to managing meltdowns. These intense emotional episodes can be overwhelming for both mother and child. For single moms, staying calm during these moments is crucial—not only to help soothe their child but also to maintain their own well-being. This post explores practical, effective techniques that ASD moms can use to stay calm and support their child through meltdown mo

One of the hardest things for single moms who have lived through narcissistic abuse is how to heal from gaslighting, to then help our children trust their own inner signals. Because kids don't learn emotional intuition from lectures, they learn it from us. From watching how we read situations, how we respond, how we recover when things go sideways. And if you grew up in chaos or manipulation or if you married into it, your inner signals were probably rewired, dismissed, or pu

Breaking the cycle and parenting differently after trauma is one of the hardest, most courageous parts of parenting after trauma. It means parenting in a way you've never seen modeled when you were a child. A lot of us are trying to break generational patterns we didn't choose. And we're doing it without a map, while still healing, still learning, and still trying to raise a child who needs us, sometimes intensely. If that's you, you're doing work your parents never did. This

How do you help your child regulate when you're not regulated yourself? If you're raising a neurodivergent child or healing from trauma, this is your daily reality. Your child has big emotions, sensory needs, meltdowns, refusals. And meanwhile, you might be dissociating, anxious, or overstimulated yourself. You love your child fiercely, but sometimes your nervous system just says, "I can't do this right now. I caaaaan't." Let's talk about what to do in those moments. T his is

There is something that sits in the back of the mind for many mothers who co-parent with someone unpredictable or high-conflict: That court date you can't stop thinking about, or the custody review, or the mediation, the evaluation, or the email that might come at any moment. This kind of stress is not theoretical, it's not just anxiety. It's your nervous system responding to something with real weight, and you are not overreacting. Your body is responding to something that r

There is an important difference between rest and escape. Escaping is something the nervous system does when it doesn't feel safe. It's a survival response. So there's no shame here. We are simply learning to notice what is happening so we can take care of ourselves better. This is the transcript for Episode 8 . What rest looks like: Rest is something that reduces stress in your body. Rest feels like your breathing slows down. Your shoulders soften, your thoughts quiet a lit

Today's question is, what do we do when their stimming overstimulates us? In most households, we hear parents talking about their kids wanting to be in their arms all the time or their kids being up against their legs all the time, wanting contact and needing that hug all the time. In parenting circles, neurotypical circles, a phrase has been coined for this. It's called being touched out . In those circles, they will remind you that love and overwhelm can coexist. That's a b

Peace can sometimes feel wrong. Like your body doesn't know what to do with it. Like there's an addiction to chaos, which is something I'm going to be covering in Episode 15A through 16B. This is something that used to confuse me and still sometimes surprises me. This is the transcript for Episode 6 . If you've lived through chaos, emotional abuse, instability, constant conflict, your nervous system learns that tension equals normal. You don't even notice it happening, your

Life doesn't stop being hard just because you understand what's happening. Healing doesn't mean the chaos disappears. It means you get better at finding stillness while it's happening. There are still court papers, still emails that spike your heart rate, still moments when your child has a meltdown and you can feel your nervous system start to overload. This is the transcript for Episode 5 . These reactions in your body, are really your body doing exactly what it was trained

When I left my marital home, I was a few weeks pregnant. At first, it didn't feel like escaping abuse. I just knew I couldn't keep living this way. The tension I felt, the fear, the constant confusion, something in me finally said, "enough". The feeling of being harrassed didn't stop after I left. In some ways, it got worse. This is the transcript for Episode 4 . But being in a new home and then eventually in another social circle gave me space to breathe and to start seeing

We talked about what it means to let peace be your defense, to stand calm when the battle finds you, in the first episode. Today I want to talk about something simple, and yet for many of us, it's the hardest thing in the world: faith. Not the poetic, flowery kind, but the literal kind. This is the transc ript for Episode 2 . Literal faith is what you hold when logic runs out. It's what you cling to when everything looks impossible, when you've done all you can and all that's

Here I talk about Mom's autism. Some of the advice below is better suited for single moms on the spectrum parenting neurotypical kids. My Podcast is where I focus on the ASD Mom + ASD kids combo. Autistic single mothers face unique challenges that often go unrecognized. Balancing the demands of parenting while managing sensory sensitivities, social expectations, and sometimes limited support can feel overwhelming. Yet, many single mothers on the spectrum find ways to thrive b

I'm Faustina, and this space is for mothers who are learning to find peace and faith in the middle of life's hardest seasons. Sometimes we don't choose the fight. The fight finds us. It shows up as heartbreak, exhaustion, betrayal, or endless responsibilities that never seem to stop. For me, it showed up through motherhood, through trauma, through co-parenting, through moments that tested everything I thought I believed. When the battle found me, I used to think peace meant e

In this post I discuss general thoughts on coparenting an ASD child. Most of them do not apply in the context of parallel parenting, when the coparenting relationship is highly litigious and feels like there's a power imbalance. I wanted to write this piece nonetheless for anyone who's not living that reality, and is just a single mom to an autistic child. The assumption here is that the coparenting relationship is highly functional. My Podcast however is where I dive into h