Mum of the Year Nominee Rewriting the Rulebook
Zoë Desmond tells Niamh O’Reilly about life as a single parent, how it changed her for the better and how she’s rewriting the rule book for thousands of other single parents.
When Zoë Desmond found herself a single parent to her one-year-old son Billy, it set her on course to design the world’s first app to connect single parents and, in the process, help an entire cohort who’d felt marginalised.
Frolo, a hybrid of the words friend and solo, was born out of necessity for Zoë, after her relationship with her partner broke down. “I suddenly felt my whole world had completely turned upside down,” recalls Zoë. “Not only was I dealing with the breakup of a relationship, which is never easy, but this was on a different level because I was grieving for the family unit I’d always hoped to create.”
Zoë found the transition to being a single parent hugely lonely. “I didn’t know any other single parents. I was wishing the weekends away, I was pushing the buggy around by myself, not wanting to impose on friends and family and not wanting anyone to feel sorry for me,” she recalls. “I was just putting on a brave face, but I was really struggling underneath.”
Despite going through the ringer, Zoë knew the breakup was the best thing for the family and she now happily co-parents Billy with her partner. “Traditionally people would have stayed together for the kids and the amount of people I’ve spoken to who said, ‘I wish my parents would have broken up when I was younger, it would have saved me years of therapy and our home would have been healthier’,” she says.
Determined to find a positive way forward, Zoë scoured the internet assuming that there was an existing app or website that could connect her with other single parents, but to her surprise there wasn’t much on offer. “All I could find were Facebook groups. They felt grim and negative and that was exactly what I didn’t want. I wanted to feel empowered, and I didn’t want to be in that mindset of needing to find another partner to make this okay or to feel valid again. I wanted to turn it around on my own terms.”
Frolo may have started as a personal project, but very soon the idea grew legs and sprinted towards the growing group of single parents who’d felt isolated and marginalised by society for years. “It started with me trying to solve my own problems, but very soon I discovered there were so many more people who felt like I did.”
That lightbulb moment came when London-based Zoë bumped into a fellow Irish mum, whom she'd known for a year, but only that day discovered that she was a single parent too. It was like an alarm going off in Zoë’s head and with the realisation that one in four families in Ireland and the UK were in fact single parent families, Zoë, whose father is businessman Dermot Desmond, knew she was onto something big. She also knew she had her work cut out for her to break down the stigma associated with the term single parent.
“When my relationship broke down, I felt this complete shame around my new identity as a single parent and I couldn’t put my finger on why that was? I never felt that I’d judged single parents before.
Looking back, I realise this was down to the negative narrative around single parents. There’s a real lack of inclusivity in children’s books and TV, everything has been traditionally centred around nuclear families so that probably was a part of the reason why I felt like I did.”
Frolo has been a lifeline for single parents and since its launch in 2019. Zoë has been keen for it to be an inclusive space for the many different types of single parenting experiences, such as single co-parents, those who are widowed, solo parents and single parents by choice. Recently she’s launched a Frolo dating app for those single parents who find other dating apps a minefield, often having their children referred to as baggage or being ghosted.
For Zoë though, Frolo has been more than just a business endeavour, it’s become part of her DNA. “It’s been the most profound game changer that I could have possibly imagined. It’s given me so much, all of my closest friends are Frolo friends, we celebrate birthdays, Easter and Mother’s Day together and Billy calls his Frolo friends his Frolo brothers and sisters.”
The proud mum admits that motherhood has been the absolute making of her in more ways than one and despite how difficult that first year was and the pain of her breakup, she feels it was meant to be. “This is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing,” she declares. “So many aspects of my life have led me here and led me to be the person who’s able to bring this all together. It’s the reason why I’m still doing it and haven’t thrown in the towel!” she laughs. “I truly believe it’s changing lives for the better.”
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