Dating and My Ready-Made Family
Did you ever try to build a life while you were still growing up yourself?
I was a single mother of 3 by the time I was 22 years old. It’s weird to even say that now. Seeing it on the screen makes my 61-year-old mind say, “Damn, I was young!”
But when I was in the thick of it?
Chile… I felt ancient.
Add to that the fact that they were stairsteps with two different fathers, and 61-year-old me laughs and says, “Girl, you were so fass…”
(Yes, spelled fass. I need you to pronounce it correctly. Smile.)
After my third child, I sat my friskiness down somewhere.
Now don’t get it twisted, I didn’t stop being fass.
I just learned to keep that part of my life separate from my babies.
They saw me co-parent with their fathers.
They didn’t see anything else.
And listen… juggling all that was NOT easy.
My mother would babysit, but her rules were carved in stone. Not open for negotiation. For them to spend the night, I had to:
bring them already ready for bed
make sure they were fully potty-trained
pick them up by 7 a.m.
A rigid framework for my… shenanigans. But we do what we’ve gotta do when we’re twenty-something and determined.
My backup sitter was Helen. Hands down the best babysitter I ever had. She drove the school bus, had five kids of her own, and I trusted that woman with my life. This was the late ’80s and early ’90s, a totally different world. The only catch? If she kept them overnight, I had to pay her. Which meant an overnighter had to really be worth it for a struggling single mother.
I’m telling you all this so you can picture what young motherhood looked like for me while still trying to live a little. To be clear, I wasn’t out in the streets just to be out there. I was in search of a father and a husband. I was convinced that would give my little crew the stability we needed.
And I confess that I kissed quite a few frogs on the way.
Every one of them hit a brick wall the moment the conversation included my three little people. That’s when they’d hit me with the line I came to hate:
“I can’t handle a ready-made family.”
Translation: “I’m not signing up to raise another man’s children.”
Ready-made?
READY MADE?!
Man… f**k you.
Who came up with that BS?
My babies were not pre-packaged items sitting on a store shelf. They gave my life purpose and direction. No, they weren’t planned like a sitcom storyline, but they were the very thing that made me whole.
Now that I’m 61, I can see the truth so clearly: I was never some “ready-made family.” I was a young woman building a whole life from scratch, holding three little hearts together while trying to keep my own from cracking. And honestly? Any man who ran at the mention of my babies wasn’t wrong… he really couldn’t handle it.
But that had nothing to do with me.
That was their limitation, not my failure.
My kids weren’t baggage. They were the blessing that forced me to grow up faster, love deeper, hustle harder, and build a backbone I didn’t even know I had. They made me courageous long before I had language for courage.
And let me tell you something else:
I wasn’t a “ready-made” anything.
I was a full-course meal, seasoned, tender, cooked with soul… and those guys? They were barely warmed up.
They weren’t ready for the assignment that was me.
If anything was ready-made back then, it was the mother I was becoming.
My children didn’t make me less desirable, they made me unplayable.
They sharpened my instincts, my boundaries, my vision, and my faith.
So no… my little crew wasn’t an obstacle.
They were my origin story.
💬 Your Turn, Sis…
Did you ever raise babies before you were finished being one?
Did you ever love a man who wasn’t ready for the life you carried?
Or hear something careless like “ready-made family”?
If any part of my story made your chest tighten or your head nod, tell me in the comments.
We’re not alone in this.
Your story matters too.