Showing Up Anyway
A Mother's Day essay about grief, guilt, and finding your way back
I haven’t written in five weeks.
Not as an apology, just as context. Because when I go quiet here it’s usually because something is asking more of me than I have left to give.
The weeks leading up to now I was already in the middle of something. Still trying to find my footing. Still figuring out what routine looks like in this season of my life. Already a little lost in the quiet, ordinary way that doesn’t make for dramatic headlines but sits with you anyway. The kind of lost where you’re functional, you’re showing up, but something underneath hasn’t quite settled yet.
And then Chellz was gone.
Two weeks ago I lost one of my best friends. It was a car accident. Sudden. No warning. No goodbye. I’m still not sure I’ve fully processed that sentence. Some days I write it and it still doesn’t feel real. Some days I forget for just a moment and then I remember, and the forgetting makes the remembering worse.
This is the second friend from my core group that I’ve lost in two years.
The first was Susie. Cancer. I watched her on FaceTime more times than I can count, always strong, always herself, even when the doctors started saying there wasn’t much more they could do. That news came fast. Faster than anyone was ready for. Then came the slower part …watching her leave, gradually, in a way I had never witnessed before and hope to never witness again. But we made sure she had happy moments before she went. We made sure she felt loved. There’s something I hold onto in that.
I flew to LA the day before she passed to say goodbye. On the way back, my friend Laura and I got caught in a storm and ended up stranded in Virginia overnight. I woke up that morning from a dream about my teeth falling out. In Dominican culture, that dream means someone is going to pass. I’ve had it before. It has always been right. I turned to Laura and told her , “Susie is gone”. Then the text came.
Grief with Susie had edges. It was devastating. But there was time… just a little, to prepare. To say the things. To be there.
Chellz had no edges. Just open. Just gone.
And in the middle of all of it , the shock, the disbelief, the weeks I lost track of entirely. I am still a mother. My kids still need breakfast. They still need to be picked up. They still need me present in the ways children need their mother present, regardless of what their mother is carrying.
So this Mother’s Day I’m not writing about thriving. I’m writing about showing up anyway. About what it looks like to still be here when part of you doesn’t know how to be.
This one is tender. Take your time with it.
Two Griefs, Nothing Alike
I thought I knew what grief felt like.
After Susie I learned it in the hardest way …slowly, with warning, with the particular weight of watching someone you love leave before they’re actually gone. That kind of grief is its own devastation. But it has a shape. You can see it coming from a distance even when you’re not ready for it. You get to say the things. You get to show up. You get to be there for the ending and carry that with you.
I didn’t know how much I had relied on that, the having time until there was none.
With Chellz there was no distance. No shape. Just a regular day and then a phone call. A phone call I will never forget Laura on the other end, screaming, and me not being able to make out the words. Not understanding, though she was speaking clearly. Asking her to slow down. Then understanding but being in denial still telling myself that there has been a mistake.
A world that didn’t have her in it anymore. No goodbye. No last FaceTime. No chance to say the thing you always assumed you’d have time to say because people like her …people that alive, that present, that yours aren’t supposed to just be gone.
That’s the thing about sudden loss that nobody really prepares you for. It doesn’t just take the person. It takes your sense of how time works. It takes the ordinary Tuesday you were having before you found out. It makes you distrust the normalcy of any given moment because you know now in your body, not just your mind that everything can change before you finish a sentence.
I’ve been going through the motions since it happened. Functioning. Showing up. Doing the things that need to be done because the things still need to be done. And then something catches me : a song, a memory, a random moment in the middle of an ordinary errand and it’s all right there again. Fresh. Like it just happened. Because in some ways it still feels like it just happened.
Time has felt completely unreliable these past two weeks. I keep losing track of it. Days blend. I’ll think something happened yesterday and it was four days ago. I’ll feel like I’ve been carrying this forever and then remember it’s only been two weeks. Grief does that. It bends time in ways that make you feel both stuck and somehow already far from the moment you most want to hold onto.
I’m not okay yet. I want to be honest about that. I’m not writing this from the other side of something. I’m writing it from the middle of it — on a rainy May weekend, trying to find my way back to myself, knowing that the way back looks different now than it did a month ago.
Because the world I’m returning to is one that doesn’t have Chellz in it. And that part I’m still learning how to hold.
Showing Up Anyway
Nobody prepares you for the specific experience of grieving while mothering.
Not the books. Not the therapy sessions. Not even the friends who have been through it. Because grief in theory is one thing and grief at 7am when someone small needs breakfast and doesn’t know why you’ve been quiet is something else entirely.
My kids know something happened. I’ve been honest with them in the way you can be honest with little people , age appropriate, gentle, just enough truth to explain why the world feels a little different in our house right now without handing them something too heavy to carry. They are five and eight. They are still at the age where a hug from me can fix most things. I am still at the age where I wish that worked in reverse.
What they don’t know is how many times I’ve excused myself to the bathroom these past two weeks.
There’s a specific kind of grief that lives in bathroom floors and in the shower. The kind you can’t let out in the open because the moment isn’t yours because dinner needs to happen, because homework needs to be checked, because your daughter is calling your name from the other room and she needs you and you love her so completely that you will pull yourself together in sixty seconds flat and walk back out there and be her mother. The shower is the one place where nobody can tell the difference between water and tears. Some days I’ve stayed in there longer than I needed to. Some days that’s been the only place the grief got to be what it actually was.
And then I’d walk back out. Every time.
The guilt of not being fully present with them has been sitting with me heavy. The moments where my body is in the room but part of me is somewhere else, somewhere that still can’t make sense of a world without Chellz in it. My kids deserve all of me. I know that. And right now all of me is also carrying something that has nowhere to go during school pickup.
This is the part of motherhood nobody puts on the cards.
Not the Instagram version. Not the Mother’s Day brunch version. The version where you are simultaneously the most important person in someone’s world and a human being who is quietly coming apart at the seams and you just keep showing up anyway because that’s what you do. Because they need you. Because love doesn’t pause for grief even when grief makes everything else feel impossible.
Showing up anyway doesn’t mean I’m okay. It just means I’m here.
And right now, here is enough.
Waking Back Up
Nobody tells you what returning to yourself actually looks like after grief knocks you sideways. I think I expected it to feel like a moment. A morning where I woke up and something had shifted and I was ready to be back. That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is quieter and slower and honestly a little unglamorous.
It looks like sitting down on a Ssturday and thinking about my week.
That might sound like nothing. But for the last two weeks I haven’t done that. I’ve just moved moment by moment, doing only what the moment required and nothing more. No planning. No looking ahead. Just the next thing and then the next thing and then bed and then again. It was the only way I knew how to survive it.
This weekend I sat down and looked at the week ahead. The kids’ schedule. Their school activities. Their extracurriculars. I wrote down my workouts so that when I get to the gym I’m not standing there lost, trying to figure out what my body is supposed to do. Small things. Ordinary things. The kind of things I used to do automatically that grief quietly took from me without asking.
I want to say something about the staff at my kids’ school. They checked in on me. They gave me grace. They knew, because they know me well enough to know that forgetting things isn’t who I am. That the woman who showed up distracted and behind these past two weeks wasn’t the whole picture. That kind of quiet, unsolicited grace is something I won’t forget. It held me in a moment when I needed holding.
I’ve also been continuing therapy. I want to say that clearly because I mentioned starting it in a previous essay and I don’t want it to be a footnote. It has been a huge help, not in fixing the grief, because grief doesn’t get fixed, but in making room for it. In helping me sit with what I feel instead of managing it into something more presentable. My therapist has helped me understand that grief isn’t something to push through. It’s something to move with. Slowly. On its own timeline.
Then almost without my permission , work started coming back in. Busy season arriving quietly, like it always does, like the world doesn’t know or care that you’ve been somewhere else entirely. Part of me wanted to push it away. Part of me was relieved. Because work, for me, is also a form of returning. A reminder that I am still here. Still building. Still capable of showing up for something beyond the survival of the day.
I’m not fully back. I want to be honest about that.
But I’m waking up. Slowly. In pieces. On some days with intention and on other days just surviving until tomorrow. For right now that’s what coming back looks like. And I’m letting it be enough.
Reflection
Sit with these gently. There’s no rushing through this one.
Where are you right now? Are you in the middle of something hard, the beginning of coming back, or somewhere in between? Can you name it without judgment?
Is there a place in your life where grief of any kind, not just loss has been asking for more space than you’ve been giving it? What would it feel like to let it have that space?
Who has given you quiet grace recently the kind you didn’t ask for but needed? Have you let yourself receive it fully?
Where are you masking it? In front of your kids, your partner, your coworkers where are you holding it together for everyone else while the bathroom floor knows the truth?
What does returning to yourself look like for you right now, not the full version, not the healed version, just the next small thing that feels like coming back?
If you are a mother carrying something heavy this Mother’s Day what would it mean to let showing up anyway be enough? Not thriving. Not performing okay. Just here. Just present. Just enough.
I want to say something to every mother reading this who is carrying something heavy today.
Not just grief the way I’m carrying it, though if that’s you, I see you completely but any kind of heavy. The exhaustion that doesn’t go away with sleep. The worry that lives in the background of everything. The version of yourself you’re still trying to find. The life you’re building while also holding everything else together with both hands.
You are doing something remarkable. Even on the days it doesn’t feel like it. Even on the days the bathroom floor knows more about how you’re really doing than anyone else in your house.
I’ve been thinking about Chellz and Susie a lot this weekend. About what it means to lose people who knew you, really knew you and how their absence changes the shape of everything around it. How you keep reaching for the phone to tell them something and then remember. How grief isn’t just missing someone. It’s missing who you are when they’re in the room.
I’m not writing this from a place of resolution. I’m writing it from a dining room table on a rainy Mother’s Day weekend, two weeks out from one of the worst phone call of my life, trying to think about next week for the first time in longer than I’d like to admit.That’s where I am.
I’m learning slowly, imperfectly, one bathroom cry and one therapy session and one Saturday planning session at a time, that coming back to yourself after something breaks you open doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in the small returns. The workout you planned. The schedule you checked. The essay you finally sat down to write. This is mine.
To Chellz , thank you for being the friend who could bring out crying laughter like nobody else. For always having good judgment about the men who came around including the one I ended up marrying. You had a hand in that and I will never forget it. “Betch! You on a date?” jajajaja . For that distinguished voice that nobody who ever heard it will forget either. For the late night texts “yo, you up” that I can still hear in your tone. For the funny videos sitting in my phone that I will never delete. For believing in your friends when they couldn’t believe in themselves. I’ve been hearing stories about that lately and how many people you quietly held up. I was one of them. Thank you.
To Susie, thank you for always picking up the phone. For filling every silence with that laugh that still rings in my ears. For talking to my kids through FaceTime, for singing with my daughter even in your final days. She still asks to call you to sing. She knows you are no longer here, but sometimes like me, she forgets. For being the kind of person things just worked out for like finding parking right away, getting the table, landing the thing that was meant for you. The world just moved a little differently for you. I always loved that about you.
Two mothers. Two friends. Gone too soon in ways that still don’t make sense.
To every mother reading this on a day that asks you to be celebrated while you’re quietly surviving… you are still here. You are still showing up. You are still enough.
Happy Mother’s Day.