When your mom dies you learn something no one warns you about…
You stop being someone’s favorite person.
There is no one whose eyes track you in a room anymore.
No one whose nervous system is wired around your safety – your happiness, your dreams, your future.
You can be deeply loved – by a partner, by friends, by your children – and still feel the absence of being held in the world. Because now that I’m a mother myself I know this in my bones:
NO ONE loves you like your mom.
No one else is responsible for loving you without conditions, without fatigue, without needing you to be easier or quieter or less. That kind of love isn’t transferable. It doesn’t get reassigned. When she’s gone you don’t just grieve her – you grieve the version of you who mattered to someone just because she existed.
The world doesn’t fall apart but something quietly shifts in yours.
You realize no one is watching the edges for you anymore.
No one is making sure you’re okay before you say you are.
No one knows that little girl that’s still alive and well inside a grown woman’s body – because the only one who could see her hiding behind all that strength was your mom.
And yet you learn to live anyway.
You become the mother who loves that way.
You pour it forward.
You give your children the kind of love that once held you together.
But some nights (like tonight) you still feel it…
That quiet, deep ache of not being anyone’s baby anymore.