I looked for this community.
It didn't exist. So I built it.

In 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, I became a single parent. The world had already turned upside down, and suddenly I was navigating it amongst a divorce, and with two children depending solely on me.

I'm lucky. I have a fantastic support system — family and friends who show up. But even with all of that, there was something I struggled to find: people who were living through the same experience. People who understood, not because they loved me, but because they were in it too.

There's something different about connecting with someone who is going through the same experience — who gets the particular exhaustion, the particular joy, the particular weight of doing this on your own.

So I started looking. I searched for communities, apps, and spaces where single parents could connect. And almost everything I found was about dating.

Don't get me wrong — I understand that. Dating is part of a lot of single parents' lives. But it's not the whole story. Not even close. There is so much more to being a single parent than who you might meet next. There's the school pickups and the sick days with no backup. The financial juggling. The co-parenting negotiations. The moments of pure pride that you want to share with someone who truly understands. The hard days when you just need to hear “Yes- me too!”

I wanted to create something focused on the parent part of “single parent”. A space built around how we're getting through the day — with real resonance, honest help, and connection that actually means something.

That's the goal of The Willow.