In the Middle of the Story I Don’t Get To Live

I’ve had some rough days lately. Not because anything extraordinary has happened but because some days, my grief shows up in the relationships I still have.

It shows up in my mom. In the way she knows me without needing words. In the way I can still be her daughter no matter how old I get, no matter how much life changes. There is something steady and grounding about being loved by her, something that has shaped me in ways I am only now beginning to fully understand. But there are moments — quiet ones I don’t always say out loud — when even that relationship feels tender in a different way.  Because as much as I cherish what I have with her, I can’t help but see it as something I may never experience from the other side.

I watch her with my sisters, too. The shared history, the inside jokes, the familiarity that comes from years of growing together. There is a rhythm to it, an ease that only exists because of time. And sometimes I find myself standing just outside of that, not because I don’t belong there, but because I am aware of what it represents. I see what it looks like for a mother to have her daughters, and I realize how much of that story I may never get to live.

There are moments when this grief widens beyond just me, and I feel it for my husband, too. I think about the father he is to our son — steady, present, full of a kind of love that shows up in both the big and the smallest moments. And I can’t help but imagine what it would have looked like for him to father a daughter. There are milestones he may never reach because the opportunity was taken before it ever arrived. The quiet, protective tenderness. The way a little girl might have wrapped him around her finger. The way he would have shown her who she is by how he loves her.

And I think about my own dad. About the bond we share, the way his presence has shaped my understanding of love, safety, and belonging. There is something sacred in the relationship between a father and a daughter. It’s steady; something that leaves a mark over a lifetime. I see it now not just as a daughter, but as a mother who doesn’t get to witness that unfold for her own child. I think about the moments they would have had together, the ones that seem small from the outside but carry so much weight. And it’s hard to sit with the reality that those moments, too, may never come to be.

That awareness follows me into other relationships.

My best friend has a daughter — the little girl who, in another version of my life, would have grown up alongside mine. They would have been close in age, close in life, the kind of friendship that forms naturally because their moms were already intertwined. I can picture it so clearly it almost feels like a memory instead of an imagination. The playdates, the milestones, the conversations we would have had as we watched them grow. And now, when I see them together, I feel two things at once. I feel genuine love for her, for the life she is living, for the daughter she gets to raise. And I feel the quiet ache of knowing my daughter isn’t there beside them. That the version of our lives that included both of our girls is not the one we are living.

It’s the same with my nieces. I love them deeply. There is no part of me that wishes them away or feels anything but gratitude for who they are in my life. But loving them doesn’t erase the awareness that they are not mine. That the role I play in their lives, as meaningful as it is, is different from the one I long for. I watch them grow, watch their personalities unfold, watch the way they interact with their mom and their dad. And it’s beautiful, but sometimes that beauty carries a weight to it, because it reflects something I am missing.

Even at church, in a place that is supposed to feel steady and grounding, I notice it. Mothers and daughters sitting side by side. Whispering to each other during the service. Fixing each other’s hair. Reaching for each other without thinking. It’s such a normal, everyday kind of closeness that most people don’t even see it anymore. But I do. I see it because I don’t have it.

And I think about the daughters I lost. Out of the three pregnancies I’ve walked through, at least two of them were girls. That isn’t an abstract idea to me. It isn’t a vague “someday” that never happened. It’s something real that was here, if only for a moment.

I don’t just grieve that they died. I grieve that I don’t get to be their mom in the ways that unfold over time. I grieve the version of our relationship that would have grown and changed and deepened through the years. I think about what it would have been like to raise them, to know them, to see parts of myself and parts of my husband reflected back through their lives. I think about who they would have been as little girls. What they would have loved, what would have made them laugh, how they would have fit into our family. I think about the way they would have known their brother, the dynamic they would have shared, the life that would have formed between them. I think about the teenage years. The tension and the closeness, the push and pull of growing up. I think about adulthood — the possibility of friendship layered on top of motherhood, the way my relationship with my own mom has evolved over time. I think about the conversations we would have had, the milestones we would have walked through together.

There are entire seasons of life that feel like they were quietly removed before I ever got to step into them. And the hardest part is that I don’t know if that will ever change. I don’t know if I will ever have a daughter here, in my arms, in my home, in the everyday rhythm of life. I don’t know if this absence is temporary or permanent. And living in that uncertainty means I am not only grieving what I’ve lost, but I am also grieving what I may never have.

There’s a verse that says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12), and I feel the weight of that in ways I never understood before. Because this isn’t just about something that ended. It’s about something that continues to exist in me with nowhere to go.

And as grateful I am for my faith, even it doesn’t promise me that everything I’ve lost will be restored here, or that I will get the story I imagined. It doesn’t rush me toward a resolution or ask me to tie this into something hopeful. What it does, sometimes quietly and sometimes almost imperceptibly, is remind me that the love I carry for my daughters is not meaningless just because I don’t get to express it in the ways I expected. That their lives, however brief, are not erased simply because they are not visible.

But if I’m being honest, there are still days when that feels far away. Days when what I see right in front of me feels louder than anything I believe. Days when every mother and daughter I encounter — whether it’s my own mom, my sisters, my friend and her little girl, my nieces, or the women I sit next to at church — feels like a glimpse into a life that runs parallel to mine but never quite intersects.

And in those moments, I don’t have a neat way to reconcile it. I just feel the absence. The ache of what should have been. All existing at the same time.