In the Middle of Surrender

Ten and a half months.

That is how long it took me to finally make the appointment. Ten and a half months since Haven died, and ten and a half months of carrying grief around in my body, in my home, in my marriage, in motherhood. In the quiet moments and the loud ones. Ten and a half months of knowing, somewhere deep down, that I needed help. And still, I resisted.

Not because I didn't believe in therapy, and not because I didn't think it could help. If I'm honest, I think I was afraid of what it would ask of me. Therapy means opening doors I've spent a long time keeping shut. It means looking at things I have learned to survive by looking away from. It means sitting across from someone and saying the things that sometimes even I don't want to admit out loud, let alone pray out loud.

After losing Haven, I spent so much time simply trying to function. Get up. Get Sully dressed. Make breakfast. Answer the emails. Go to work. Make dinner. Do the bedtime routine. Smile when I was supposed to smile, laugh when something was actually funny, cry when I couldn't hold it in anymore. Go to sleep. Wake up. Do it again. There is a certain kind of survival that looks an awful lot like normal life from the outside, and I got good at looking normal.

But losing Haven broke my world open, and I don't mean just in the obvious way. Of course it shattered me. Of course losing my daughter changed me. Of course there are parts of me that will never be the same. But grief also has a way of exposing things that were never actually about the grief itself. It pulled the floorboards up. It turned the lights on in rooms I had kept dark for a very long time, rooms that had nothing to do with Haven at all.

Underneath the floorboards were things that had been there for years, wounds I had carried since long before I ever knew her, things I had learned to manage, to minimize, to carry quietly without ever setting them down, and without ever setting them at God's feet either. Losing her didn't create those wounds. It just made it impossible to keep pretending they weren't there.

Before Haven, maybe I could have kept avoiding them. Maybe I could have kept moving, kept convincing myself I was fine enough, that faith meant not asking too many questions. But then she died, and suddenly I wasn't able to outrun any of it anymore. Grief doesn't care about the walls you've carefully built, and it turns out neither does God. He has never needed my walls to reach me. He just kept waiting on the other side of them. Eventually I realized that if I wanted to heal, even if "heal" still feels like a word I don't fully understand yet, I was going to have to stop running from the places grief had uncovered, and let Him meet me there instead of just outside them.

So I made the appointment. And I was terrified, because there is something deeply uncomfortable about willingly walking back toward the place where you were hurt.

I already know what it feels like to be in that hospital room. I know what it feels like to hear the words no mother should ever have to hear, to give birth to your baby and not hear her cry, to hold her knowing you will never get to bring her home, to leave the hospital with empty arms. I know. And now I'm choosing to go back there — not physically, but emotionally, piece by piece, memory by memory, feeling by feeling. But that room isn't the only room I'll be walking back into. There are others. Older ones. Memories from years before Haven that I buried instead of processed, moments I decided long ago I would just carry and never look at again. Losing her is what finally cracked those doors open too. This was never only going to be about grieving my daughter. It's about facing everything I never let myself face, and she is the reason I finally stopped running from all of it, not just from her.

There are moments when I think, why would I willingly do this to myself? Why would I sit in a room and dig around in the deepest wounds of my life? Why would I pull the scab off something that barely feels like it has begun to close?

But maybe that's the point. I'm not going back there to stay. I'm going back so I can finally begin to dig myself out. For the first time, I'm realizing that avoiding the pain isn't the same thing as healing from it, and maybe I've been confusing survival with healing this whole time. I've also been confusing self-sufficiency with faith, as if needing help somehow meant I trusted God less, when maybe it's actually where trusting Him starts.

Survival got me through the last ten and a half months. It got me out of bed. It helped me take care of my son, keep working, keep showing up. It helped me keep breathing when some days that was the only thing I could manage, even when my prayers were just his name and hers, over and over, with nothing else attached. I'm grateful for that version of me. She did what she had to do. But I don't want to live forever in survival mode. I want to understand myself again. I want to understand what happened to me when Haven died, not just what happened around me. I want to make space for the parts of my story that existed before her and the parts that were born because of her. I want to learn how to carry grief without letting it convince me I have to carry everything else alone, and without letting it convince me that God has stepped back just because I can't feel Him the way I used to.

I don't know what therapy will do. I don't know how long I'll go, or if I'll walk out of every session feeling lighter. I'm sure there will be days when I leave feeling worse, days when the memories feel closer instead of farther away, days when I wonder why I opened the door in the first place. But I'm willing to try, and I'm asking God to sit in that room with me too, even on the days I don't have words for Him.

Ten and a half months after losing my daughter, I'm finally willing to admit that I don't have to do all of this by myself. Maybe this is another kind of surrender. Not surrendering my grief, not surrendering my memories of Haven, not surrendering the love that still exists between us, but surrendering the idea that I have to be strong enough to figure all of this out alone, or holy enough to not need anyone's help doing it.

So here I am. Stepping into the hard place. Opening the doors. Facing the things I've spent years avoiding. Putting myself right back in it, not because I want to relive the worst moments of my life, but because I want to find my way through them, believing that He is somewhere in the walking, not just waiting at the finish line of it.

If I'm going to walk through all of this anyway, I want something good to come out of it. I want Haven's life, however short, to have moved something in mine that would have otherwise stayed stuck. If that means releasing myself from chains I've been bound to for most of my life, patterns and fears and old survival habits I built long before I ever knew her name, then that is exactly what I intend to do. I want to step into who God actually created me to be, not who I became by default while I was busy just getting through things.

And I honestly don't know exactly what that person looks like yet. If it makes me softer, great. I'd love to be softer. But if it makes me harder in some ways too, more boundaries, less tolerance for things I used to just absorb, a little less willing to shrink myself to keep the peace, that's okay too. I don't think softness is the only marker of healing. Sometimes healing looks like a spine you didn't have before.

And maybe there is something on the other side of all this digging. Not the old me. I don't think she is coming back. But maybe someone new. Someone who knows that the broken places don't have to be hidden to be beautiful. Someone who can carry Haven with her without being crushed beneath the weight of losing her. Someone who can finally say: this happened to me. It broke me. But it will not be the end of me. And it was never the end of His story for me either.

Maybe this is what healing looks like in the tender middle. Not moving on. Not forgetting. Not getting over it. Just being brave enough to walk into the broken places, trusting that little by little, and with God walking each step alongside me, I can find my way back out.