How to Rebuild Your Life as a Single Mom

Katina Sullivan will tell you she is not who she used to be. She will tell you this plainly, without apology, and with the kind of quiet certainty that can only come from someone who has been rebuilt from the inside out.

The Library That Started Everything

Katina grew up loving patterns and fabric. In high school, the tall cabinets in her parents’ kitchen held not dishes but folded textiles, tucked away like a secret language only she could read. That love never left her. But it took heartache, time, and a specific kind of surrender to understand what it was actually for.

When she began building what would become Ally Lane Interiors, she started in her own home, redesigning her personal library. Every piece she chose carried meaning. A concrete table at the center of the room reminded her that God would be her anchor. Each object was both decor and declaration, part of her own healing, part of the restoration God was quietly doing in her life.

“Our homes should not be a museum to look at and not touch, nor a place of chaos and disorder, but a place that cultivates the people within — a greenhouse where they grow.”

Katina Sullivan

Out of that process came a vision, and a motto: “Our homes should not be a museum to look at and not touch, nor a place of chaos and disorder, but a place that cultivates the people within, a greenhouse where they grow.”

Today, she walks into clients’ homes not just to rearrange furniture but to understand families, to ask questions about the kid who needs solitude and the one who craves a party and the parent who needs a place to exhale. She calls it a greenhouse. She means it literally. And when she is in the home of a family who will never set foot in a church, she gets to be Jesus to them. She gets to listen.

When You Cannot See Past Tuesday

Starting a business is hard when life is stable. Katina started hers while also navigating divorce and single motherhood, which is something closer to running a marathon in the dark while someone keeps moving the finish line.

Her friend Mary saved her, or close to it. Mary would sit with Katina and map out each day of the week: this call on Monday, this task on Wednesday, this step by Friday. Then she would follow up. She was not pushy, Katina says, just the right amount of present. What Katina did not know until years later was that Mary would go home and tell her husband she was not sure Katina was going to make it.

Katina survived anyway. But she is careful not to make the path sound smoother than it was. There were moments, she says, of standing still and realizing that everything she thought was going to happen wasn’t going to happen. Her personal life and her professional life were both pivoting at the same time, and they were both asking the same question: what now?

Her answer, then and now, is not a strategy. It is a practice. You get up. You put one foot on the ground and then the other. You make the next phone call. You ask Jesus what to do next. And then you do that thing. There is no three-step plan, she says. There is only the next thing.

“People are hope when you can’t see hope. People are like the bridge to Christ and to God. When you’re down in the dumps, and they are saying, no, there is still truth, there is still life—reminding you that there’s another life ahead. I think that’s powerful.” —Katina Sullivan

The Prayer She Wrote at Twenty and Found at Forty

One of the most disorienting things about divorce, Katina explains, is that there is no ceremony for it. There is no Caring Bridge page, no casserole brigade, no communal ritual of mourning. The marriage ends, and the world keeps moving, and you are left standing in what feels like your own private time zone, everything heavy, everyone else apparently fine.

For Katina, one of the losses was her sense of self. She had been a wife, a mother, a ministry leader. She had given her professional life to developing the hearts of children and families. Divorce did not just change her circumstances. It crashed her categories. She remembers telling someone, “I feel like half a person now.”

She knew, theologically, that this was not true. Identity in Christ does not hinge on marital status. She could have told you that in any Sunday school class, any women’s Bible study. But knowing something in your head and inhabiting it in your chest are two different things. And grief does not accept theology as a shortcut.

Then, about a year after the divorce, she found the prayer.

“God, I am still who you’ve called me to be. I’m a whole person here, and You’ve got plans for me.”

Katina Sullivan

She had written it in 1992, as part of a discipleship group that spent six months helping members craft a life purpose prayer from Scripture. Katina had collected verses she felt were meant specifically for her, woven them into a single prayer, and carried it with her for decades. Through marriage and moves and children and careers, that prayer had traveled with her. Then she lost it. And then, at exactly the moment she needed it most, she found it again.

She read it and sobbed. Because the prayer had nothing to do with roles. It said nothing about being a wife, nothing about her job title, nothing about the life she had planned. It was rooted entirely in who God had called her to be, and that had not changed. Not even a little.

God Never Says Suck It Up Buttercup

For much of her life, Katina prided herself on not being emotional. If she’s being honest, her internal response to other people’s pain was often, “So what’s the big deal?” She did not say it out loud. But somewhere in the back of her mind, she had absorbed the idea that the Christian thing to do was not feel too much, to keep moving forward, to stay cheerful for everyone else.

Then her own life broke open, and she could no longer sustain the performance.

She brought her questions to God. She asked why He was not stopping the pain. She read the Psalms and finally understood why David asked those same questions. She had studied lament as a category. Now she was living inside one.

And what she found was not condemnation. God did not tell her to push through, smile harder, or remember her blessings. Instead, she says, He began to show her that every real, suppressed feeling could be brought to Him and reoriented. Disappointment could be placed in His hands, and He could hand back hope. The feelings were not problems to be corrected. They were doorways.

“I began to bring those feelings to the Lord and allow Him to redefine those feelings. Lord, I am disappointed in this. But in my disappointment, You give hope because You are hope in my disappointment.”

—Katina Sullivan

Her compassion score on the spiritual gifts test is considerably higher these days.

Gratitude as a Weapon

Joy begins with admitting heartache. This is not a comfortable formula, Katina says. It does not make for a good coffee mug. But she has tested it against the hardest years of her life, and it has held.

The pathway is simple and not easy: heartache leads you to Jesus, and in Jesus you find joy. Lament, practiced honestly, does not end in despair. It ends in praise and in the presence of God. That, she says, is not a bad place to land.

She also names comparison as one of joy’s most reliable enemies. She could have spent years measuring her life against the lives of friends who were still married, still in the season she had imagined for herself. For a time, bitterness was close enough to touch.

Her antidote was gratitude, chosen deliberately, as an act of will. When she chooses gratitude, she says, she destroys bitterness.

One Sunday, not long ago, she stood in church with one daughter on each side of her. All three of them were singing, worshiping with full hearts, having been through the fire together. She looked at her girls and thought: it doesn’t get any better than this.

She means it. The business she would never have built, the clients she would never have met, the depth of compassion she would never have grown into. That is the beauty, she says. That is what comes from the ashes.

What She Would Tell You

If you are in the early days of something hard, Katina wants you to know two things. First: the pain you are feeling right now is real. It is valid. It is as deep and as dark as it feels. You are not being a wuss. Second: it is not always going to be there. There is hope. She says this not as a platitude but as a person who needed both truths said to her plainly, who had friends willing to say them.

She has also learned to show up for others differently than she used to. She talks less now. She asks more questions. She has discovered that people heal as they talk, and that the Ministry of Presence is often worth more than the curriculum she spent years preparing. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is stay, sit down, and say nothing.

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.”

Scott Sauls

She closes with a quote she loves, from the book Beautiful People Don’t Just Happen: “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.” She loves it because she is living proof. She is a different person now. It took a lot of scars to get here. She would not trade a single one.

Your identity is not your role. Your purpose does not expire when your season changes. The prayer you wrote about who God made you to be is still true. Bring your lament. Choose gratitude. Do the next thing. Stay tight with Jesus.

That is the whole ministry. That is the whole life.

This article was adapted from an interview with Katina Sullivan. To hear the full conversation, watch the complete episode on the Mission Single Podcast, hosted by Kelly Werner.

Recommended Resources:

Beautiful People Don’t Just Happen by Scott Sauls

The Scars That Have Shaped Me by Vaneetha Rendall Risner