A girl looking at a girl.
For a long time, I told myself I needed two parents to make a complete family. That belief wasn’t imagined, it was rooted in my own experience of paternal abandonment in adolescence, and it was painfully real. It imprisoned me for years.
My husband and I were approaching our 19th year of marriage. On the outside, we looked like the picture-perfect family. But we were struggling in ways that had been building for a long time. The summer of 2025 we hit a crisis point. I needed to get the girls away and change the air, change the scene. So I loaded my four daughters into the car and drove to Carmel.
Looking back, this was my first act of taking charge as a single mom, though I didn’t name it that yet. It wasn’t the first time I’d traveled alone with the girls, but it felt different. Two nights in a hotel, just the five of us. No co-pilot, no backup. I felt small and unsure of myself on the drive down, wondering if I was enough to hold the whole thing together.
By the end of the weekend, I had my answer. It wasn’t about replacing two parents or filling someone else’s shoes. It was about showing up as myself, fully, without interference, without someone else’s doubt clouding the room. When it was just us, I could hear myself think. And what I found was: I knew exactly what I was doing.
The universe made sure to test that early. We were in the hotel pool, all the girls, laughing, splashing, when a staff member appeared at the gate. There was a situation outside. Cops! They needed everyone back in their rooms immediately. I had four wet kids, a pile of towels, and about thirty seconds to move.
I didn’t panic. I just moved and wrapped everyone up, got them upstairs, and locked the door. Within thirty minutes we knew everything was okay. But what stayed with me was how quickly I’d acted and how calm my girls had been the whole time. They were reading me. They took their cues from me about how scared to be. My nervous system sets the temperature for the whole family.
The rest of the weekend was not picture-perfect. But I found moments of real connection with my girls that I hadn’t expected to find. And somewhere in the middle of all of that imperfection, I found myself again.
I didn’t need what I thought I needed, because I am the show. And I can run it.
Carmel was the beginning of rebuilding. There’s still a lot to go. But it started there, with the simple act of going.
— Jenni