Somewhere along the way, wanting things got complicated. Not the practical wanting — the wanting of a functioning boiler and enough sleep and for the school run to go smoothly. That kind of wanting, you kept. You had to. But the other wanting: the deeper, more personal kind. The wanting of things for yourself. A career that excites you. A relationship that feels right. A version of your life that is also shaped around who you are and not just around what everyone else needs.

That wanting got buried. It had to — there was no room for it, and frankly, there were days when it felt like a dangerous distraction from the actual work of keeping everything going. So you learned to stop surfacing it quite so much. To respond to the occasional glimpse of it — the flash of wanting something — with a kind of practiced indifference. No point in that. Not yet. Maybe one day. And gradually, the wanting quietened, and you became very good at not knowing what you wanted anymore.

This guide is about the excavation of that. The slow, careful process of finding out what you actually want — at this point in your life, in this chapter, as the specific person you have become through everything you have been through — and learning to want it without apology.

Why wanting feels selfish

The message that your desires come last is one you likely received long before you became a single parent. When you are the only parent, when the responsibility is entirely yours, when there is no one to share the weight — the idea of also having wants that compete with the children's needs can feel genuinely irresponsible. Selfish. Indulgent.

It isn't. But knowing it isn't doesn't immediately dissolve the feeling that it is. That feeling is deeply installed, and it takes conscious, repeated work to examine it. Not to eliminate it — but to put it in proportion. Your needs matter. Not instead of your children's. As well as.

Knowing what you want is not self-indulgence. It is the foundation of everything. It is impossible to build a life you actually want if you don't know what that is.

Finding your way back to wanting

The way back to knowing what you want is not a single dramatic revelation. It is a series of small enquiries. A quiet, persistent asking. What would I do with this evening if I chose purely for myself? What made me feel most alive before the years got heavy? What is the thing I keep almost doing and then talking myself out of? What do I look at in other people's lives not with envy exactly, but with a particular recognition — yes, that, I want that?

These questions are the beginning. They are low-stakes — just curiosity, just noticing. But they are how you start to recover the want that got buried. Not by demanding it emerge fully formed, but by creating just enough space that it can surface when it's ready.