Written in the weeks after my mum died.
My mum died and the world didn’t stop spinning.
The plates I was already spinning didn’t fall. They just slowed. Enough for me to catch my breath. Enough to realise I was still expected to keep going.
I didn’t have school runs to anchor the day. I had evenings. Bedtimes. The quiet weight of the end of the day when everyone else sleeps and there’s nowhere left to put the feelings.
I had already been grieving her.
Therapy told me that. In November, months before she died. I was told I’d been grieving the loss of my mum for a long time, because she hadn’t been the mum who raised me for years. I was encouraged to create distance. So I did.
We didn’t have her over at Christmas.
She died two weeks later.
I will never stop turning that over in my head. I was never going to know. But knowing that doesn’t make it lighter.
I posted a scrapbook spread about my son twenty four hours before she died. Photos of his first weeks. She wasn’t in them. Not because I left her out. Because she wasn’t there. She couldn’t be. It was too heavy for her to witness her daughter becoming a mother.
She had given up a baby at sixteen. She never fully recovered from that.
After she died, I had to pick up pieces I didn’t know how to name. Grief, yes. But also resentment. The weight of how much she needed from me. The ache of how little she could give back.
She stopped mothering me when I was eighteen. Like a contract ending. Clean. Final.
I carry the fear of that now. I hold it close.
I hope I never stop wanting my daughter to be my baby. I hope I want her forever and a day. I hope love doesn’t have an expiry date. I hope it doesn’t ask to be renegotiated when life gets hard.
If you’re trying to hold it together while carrying complicated love, unfinished grief, or feelings you’re ashamed to admit exist, you’re not alone.
Sometimes holding it together doesn’t look like strength.
Sometimes it looks like staying.
