The beginning
Running from the monster of instability
For years I moved to survive. I moved out of abuse. I moved away from slumlords embedded in every lease I signed. I moved because a place stopped being safe, because a landlord violated my rights, because the support I was promised never came. Every move felt like the right decision in the moment. And every move left me ten steps back.
I moved up and down the East Coast. I moved across the country to Arizona. I have lived in the middle of nowhere — I literally picked a spot on a map and relocated there with my small children. I have moved toward family and been let down. I have moved toward relationships and paid a price I could not afford. I have chased stability my entire adult life and watched it stay just out of reach.
I am also neurodivergent. Which means every transition was not just logistical. It was sensory, emotional, and deeply disorienting. Managing my own nervous system while managing three children and a move is a level of complexity that no checklist or moving company ever addressed.
What no one talks about
The complexity single mothers actually carry
All three of my children have special needs. Every single move meant navigating IEP transfers across states and counties. It meant finding new specialists, new doctors, new therapists, new schools — in cities where I knew no one.
I have coordinated care teams from scratch. I have sat in IEP meetings in unfamiliar school districts fighting for services my children had already qualified for in another state. I have lost months of services during transfer gaps. I have started over more times than I can count.
And through all of it I googled everything. I tried everything. And I still always seemed to miss the mark — because the information was never built for my specific complexity. It was built for two-parent households, for families with support networks, for people moving toward something instead of running from something.
“The information existed. The checklists existed. The advice existed. None of it was built for a neurodivergent single mother of three special needs children navigating her fourteenth move alone.”
The shift
The moment I heard my inner child
Every time we pulled up to a new place — every single time — one of my children would look up at me and ask: “Mommy, are we home yet?”
That question broke something open in me. Because I realized I did not have an answer. Not because we had not arrived. But because I had never actually planned to land. I had only ever planned to move.
I was in survival mode so deep that stopping felt dangerous. Settling felt risky. My entire identity had been built around being someone who could handle anything alone — which is a strength. But it was also keeping me in motion when what my children needed most was for me to stop.
That question — Mommy, are we home yet — is why everything changed. It is why I started doing the real work. Not the logistics of moving. The internal work of understanding why I kept moving, what I actually needed, and who I was becoming when survival mode was not running the show.
Why this exists
I built what I needed and never had
I eventually learned that relocation — when done in alignment, with a real plan and real support — can be the beginning of a healing, safe, and thriving journey. Not just another address. A real landing.
Settle for More exists because single mothers deserve that landing. Not the version that happens by accident. The version that is planned, intentional, and built for her family’s actual needs — IEPs, healthcare navigation, community vetting, and the identity shift that makes it all stick.
“She is not someone who can’t settle down. She is someone who has never had the plan, the support, or the safety it actually takes to land. That is what I am here to change.”
And when the revenue from this work allows it — the Settle for More Foundation will serve the women who need this most and cannot pay for it. Single mothers fleeing domestic violence. Women in housing crisis. The ones running the hardest with the least to run with. That is the mission. Every landing we support gets us closer to it.