In the Middle of Mother’s Day

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, and I’ve realized something over these past seven months: my heart exists in two places at once.

Part of me is fully here, grounded in the life I still get to live with Sully. I get to hold him, hear his laugh echo through the house, comfort him when he cries, watch him grow into himself, and experience all the ordinary, sacred parts of motherhood. I am endlessly grateful for him. Truly. Being his mom is one of the greatest privileges of my life.

And at the exact same time, another part of me is grieving constantly. Grieving Haven. Grieving the version of motherhood I thought I would have. Grieving the future I carried in my head for so long before everything shattered.

It has been almost seven months since she died, and there are still days where my mind cannot fully accept that this is real. The hospital still lives inside me. Certain moments are burned so deeply into my memory that I think they will stay there forever. I still replay the conversations, the silence, the fear, the decisions we had to make while our world was collapsing around us. I still replay the exact moments where our lives split into before and after.

People talk about time as if it is supposed to create distance from grief, but that has not been my experience. Time has not carried me away from it. It has only changed the shape of it. The shock fades. But the permanence settles deeper.

You slowly realize this is not something you “move on” from. This is something you carry for the rest of your life while the rest of the world keeps moving. And the hardest part is that love and grief coexist all the time now.

Loving Sully does not lessen the pain of missing Haven. Being grateful does not cancel out heartbreak. Joy does not erase absence.

I wish more people understood that two completely opposite emotions can live in the same body at the same time. There is this unspoken pressure after loss to focus only on what you still have, as if acknowledging your grief somehow means you are ungrateful for what remains. But that is not how this works.

I can look at Sully and feel overwhelming love while simultaneously grieving the sibling relationship he should have had. I can watch him grow and still ache for the little girl who was supposed to grow beside him. I can feel thankful for my son while mourning the chaos, noise, and fullness our home was supposed to hold. I grieve the future I memorized in my mind. The family traditions I imagined. The milestones that will now always feel incomplete. The version of our family that only exists in my heart now.

Even happy moments carry grief inside them. Being around friends and their growing families can be beautiful and painful at the same time. I genuinely love celebrating them. I love their children. I love seeing life continue. But there is always this quiet awareness of who is missing from mine.

Grief follows you into the good moments. Not because you are bitter. Not because you cannot feel joy. But because love does not disappear simply because someone died.

And another layer of grief I do not talk about enough is the realization that we likely will not have more children. That loss has its own kind of devastation. It is grieving not only the child who died, but grieving the closing of a chapter I was never ready to close. It is realizing some experiences of motherhood may already be behind me before I even understood they were ending. It is mourning the life I thought I still had time for. There is something profoundly painful about having your future rewritten without your permission.

People often want grief to become something softer over time. Something easier to look at. Easier to explain. Something inspiring or poetic. But some parts of grief are not beautiful. Some parts are brutal. Some parts stay raw no matter how much time passes. Some days it still feels impossible that the world continues normally while my brain is still trying to make sense of what happened to us.

Mother’s Day is complicated for me because I am both incredibly blessed and deeply heartbroken. Tomorrow I will celebrate being Sully’s mom. I will hold him close. I will memorize his laugh. I will thank God for every second I get with him. And underneath all of that, I will still ache for Haven. I will still ache for the family I thought we would be. I will still carry the emptiness her absence left behind.

Both things are true.
They will probably always be true.

This is what grief has taught me: A heart can break and keep beating at the same time.