Nobody is coming to save you. And the day you accept that is the day everything changes.
Introduction
I do not have a morning routine.
This is not an admission I make lightly in a world where every productivity guru insists that the first hour of your day determines the rest of it. But honesty matters more than optics, so here it is: I sleep late because I work late, and I wake up when my body decides it has rested enough. Then I open my eyes and the weight of everything I am building lands on my chest before my feet hit the floor.
Affiliate marketing. Freelance writing. An online tutoring platform. A wellness brand rooted in African herbal wisdom. A TEFL certificate in progress. Forex trading in training. Five income streams, simultaneously, while holding down an HR career — and raising two daughters, aged 20 and 15, largely alone.
There is no guidebook for this. There is no mentor group, no cohort, no weekend retreat with women who understand the particular mathematics of this life. There is just the morning, and the list, and the decision — again — to get up.
The number nobody talks about
In Kenya, about 60% of women experience at least one episode of single motherhood by age 45. That is not a crisis statistic in this country — it is simply a demographic reality. We are everywhere. In offices, in markets, in school pickup lines and late-night side hustle sessions. We are the majority of a certain kind of quiet endurance that Kenyan society has decided to normalise without ever actually supporting.
Research consistently shows that single mothers experience substantially more psychological stress than their married counterparts — not primarily because of lower income, but because of the absence of a partner’s support, financial and otherwise. The study puts it clinically. What it cannot capture is what that absence actually feels like at 11pm when an idea you have been trying to build for three weeks still will not sit right in your head, and there is nobody to turn to and say: does this make sense, or am I losing my mind?
You are not losing your mind. You are just doing it alone.
The thing about ideas
Here is what they do not tell you about building something from scratch: the hardest part is not the market research or the platform setup or the learning curve of a new skill. The hardest part is when the thing in your head and the thing on your screen refuse to match.
I have a wellness brand called Roots & Resonance. I believe in it deeply — in the African herbal traditions it draws from, in the science of healing frequencies, in the idea that the body knows things that no certificate can teach. When it works, it feels like recovering something that was always mine. When it does not work — when the content feels flat, when the audience engages with the aesthetics but misses the substance, when the vision is clear in my mind but blurry on the page — it is a specific kind of frustration that compounds everything else.
Because when you are a single mother building alone, a bad day at work is not just a bad day. It is evidence that you might not have what it takes. It feeds the doubt that sits permanently at the back of your mind, waiting for an opening.
Studies show that entrepreneurs are twice as likely to experience depression and three times more likely to struggle with addiction than traditional employees. For women, one in five women entrepreneurs has reported experiencing mental health disorders — compared to one in eight men. Nobody in the motivational content space leads with this. Everyone leads with the freedom, the flexibility, the potential. The meltdowns happen off camera.
I have them. I bury my head in my hands sometimes and feel the full weight of what I have taken on. And then I put on my big girl pants and go back at it. Not because I have cracked the code. But because nobody is coming, and the girls need school fees, and the idea is still there waiting.
The guilt that does not have a name
There is a particular guilt that single mothers who are also building something carry, and I have not seen it written about honestly anywhere.
It is the guilt of leaning on your children.
My daughters are 20 and 15. They are aware of the juggling — aware, in the way that children of hustling parents always are, of the late nights and the projects and the pivots. I try to shield them from the weight of it. But there are days when the shield slips, and I find myself processing something out loud that a partner should be absorbing, and I watch my daughter’s face shift into the particular stillness of a child who is carrying something she was not meant to carry yet.
That is the moment that breaks me more than any failed launch or unread pitch. The moment I wonder whether I am modelling resilience or just outsourcing my anxiety to someone twenty years younger than me.
The doubt spirals from there. Am I the right role model? Is this version of me — scattered, striving, perpetually unfinished — what I want them to internalise as what a woman looks like? Am I teaching them that you can build a life on your own terms, or am I teaching them that exhaustion is just what adulthood means?
I do not have a clean answer. What I have is the knowledge that I am asking the question — and that asking it, I think, is the difference.
What actually keeps you going
People will tell you to find your why. They will suggest vision boards and journaling practices and affirmations. These things have their place. But the honest answer, at least for me, is simpler and heavier than any of that.
My children. That is it. That is the whole answer.
Not as an abstraction — not “I want to leave them a legacy” or “I want to show them what is possible.” It is more immediate than that. It is: they need things, and I am the one who provides them, and that is non-negotiable. The fees are due. The electricity needs to stay on. The 15-year-old needs to feel that her world is stable even when mine is not.
That is not inspirational. It is just true. And on the days when nothing is working and everything feels impossible and the gap between where I am and where I need to be feels uncrossable, that truth is the only thing that functions as a floor.
You stop. You breathe. You put on the pants. You go back.
What I would tell another woman standing here
Not: you can do it. That is too easy, and it skips the part where it is genuinely, structurally hard.
Not: believe in yourself. Because belief fluctuates, and you cannot build a life on something that abandons you at 2am.
This is what I would say: the meltdowns are not failure. They are your nervous system processing an extraordinary amount of pressure with inadequate support. Let them happen. Then get up.
The doubt about whether you are doing the right thing is not weakness — it is the sign of a conscious parent who takes the responsibility seriously. Unconscious people do not worry about this. You do. That matters.
And the leaning on your children — acknowledge it, apologise when you need to, and keep working to build the support structures that mean you lean on them less. It is a process, not a verdict on your parenting.
Single mothers in Kenya face limited access to credit, social stigma, and inadequate policy support. The system is not designed to make this easy. Which means getting this far, building this much, holding this much — is not ordinary. Even when it feels ordinary. Even when it feels like failure.
You are not failing. You are building. In the only way available to you, with the resources you have, for the people who need you most.
Put on the pants. Go back at it.
Lillian Maina is a Nairobi-based HR professional and writer with over 15 years of experience. She is the founder of Roots & Resonance, a wellness brand rooted in African herbal wisdom and healing frequencies.
Sure Media Magazine 
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