Just A Girl Learning To Live Without Her Mom

Grief in real time. Raw thoughts, morning porch tears, and the weight of losing the person who made me feel safe. Just trying to keep breathing, one post at a time.

[justagirl198310]

Since my last post, life hasn’t really slowed down. It just… kept happening.

There have been specialist appointments and therapy evaluations. Medication changes. Insurance battles. Parenting moments where I’ve had to make impossible decisions while trying to keep three kids moving forward. Boundary fights that left me emotionally drained. Work that never really lets up. Just the constant balancing act of being the person everyone depends on.

I’ve laughed, too. I joked that a pedicure almost turned into a FootFinder side hustle. I started rewatching Buffy and Angel. I got way too invested in Taylor Swift rumors. I finally perfected my lasagna after multiple attempts. I’ve planned gifts for people I love and had moments where life was genuinely funny.

From the outside, none of that probably has anything to do with grief. But it does… every single one of those things happened without my mom.

That’s the part people don’t really see. Grief isn’t always crying in bed or looking through old pictures. It’s getting through a random Tuesday and realizing you handled something you absolutely would have called your mom about. She’s still the first person I want to tell things to.

When something funny happens, I think about telling her. When I’m frustrated, I think about telling her. When one of the kids does something that would make her smile, I think about telling her.

When I’m scared… I still want my mom.

People talk about “moving forward” like grief stays behind you. Mine doesn’t. It just comes with me. I’ve learned how to live around it. I’ve learned how to function.

There have been days where I’ve felt strong. Days where I’ve done all the things and probably looked like I had it together.

But underneath all of it is this one thought that never really leaves. I wish my mom were here. I don’t even say it very often anymore. Sometimes I don’t consciously think it. It’s just… there.

The hardest part about the second year of grief isn’t that it hurts less. It’s that everyone else expects more from you. People stop checking in because they assume you’ve adjusted. Life just keeps asking things of you.

Meanwhile, the biggest thing that has ever happened to you slowly becomes old news to everyone else. But it isn’t old news to me. I’m still learning how to live in a world where my mom only exists in memories.

I’m still becoming someone she never got to know. Every milestone. Every hard day. Every ordinary day that I survive without her is another reminder that I’ve lived another piece of my life she wasn’t here to see.

Life keeps happening. I keep living it.

But even when I don’t talk about her… I’m still missing my mom.

[justagirl198310]

Front-row seats to a great show. Fireworks in front. Lightning in the back.

I wish I could send my mom about 2,613 shaky, grainy videos of it. Instead, I’ll share one here.

Life is still heavy, but tonight, just for a little bit, all I thought about was how unbelievably cool the sky looked.

[justagirl198310]

I keep saying things like “I wish she could see this.” And people respond with things like “she does, in her own way” or “she’s watching from above.”

But that’s not what I mean.

I don’t picture her somewhere looking down at us or keeping up with everything we’re doing. She was tired. She fought hard and she was ready. I think she stayed just long enough to know we’d be okay, and then she finally went to rest.

And I’m glad for that. She deserves to rest and renew.

When I say “she should be here,” it’s not about her. It’s about me.

It’s about the fact that I still need her here. Not in some spiritual way. Not in a “she’s still with you” way. I mean here. Physically. In the room. In the moment. And these big moments make that really obvious. They’re the kind of moments you’re supposed to have your mom for. The kind where you look over without thinking and expect her to be there.

So when I say “I wish she could see this,” what I really mean is…

I wish you were here with me. Because I still need you.

[justagirl198310]

Hi Mom.

I miss you hard today.

Eli finished his last day of high school today. He’s about to step into the world as an adult, and you won’t be here to see it. His last choir concert was last night… and his loudest cheerleader wasn’t there. I know he felt that. So did I.

Lil is about to be in junior high. You would be so proud of her. She’s learning and growing and becoming her own person. She’s come a long way this year, and I wish you were here to see her transform.

And El is finishing up her second college credit in 9th grade. She starts Upward Bound tomorrow. You saw how smart she was… but you didn’t get to see her lock in. I think you would’ve been impressed with her commitment this year, and I hate that you weren’t here to watch it.

These are big moments. The kind you’re supposed to have your mom with you for. And I don’t.

We deserved to have you here for this.

I just… miss you.

[justagirl198310]

One year, and then one more day.

Yesterday was one year since my mom died. I thought that would be the hardest part. The actual date, the time, all of it. And it was heavy, but today feels different in a way I wasn’t expecting.

Today is the one year mark of the first time I woke up in a world where she didn’t exist anymore. And that’s the part that’s getting to me.

Yesterday was about the moment she left. Today is about the moment I had to stay.

I remember that morning so clearly. There was no confusion, no moment of forgetting. My body already knew before I even opened my eyes. It was just there, sitting on my chest, in my stomach, everywhere at once. Heavy. Final.

Opening my eyes meant stepping into it fully. Into a world where she was gone and nothing could undo it.

I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want the day to start because I knew what it meant.

She wasn’t here.

And there was no break from it. No softening. Just that constant, crushing awareness that this was real now and I was going to have to live in it.

I couldn’t keep myself together. Not even a little.

And this part is complicated, but it’s true. I had to lean on my sister. The same person I struggle with now, the same person I don’t trust. But in that moment, I needed someone and she was there. I didn’t have the luxury of choosing the right kind of support. I just needed support. That was survival.

Today I went to the spring. It was raining, light and steady, and windy. The kind of rain that just exists around you without asking anything from you. I talked to her. I told her I think about her every day, even when I don’t consciously remember that I did. I told her I think I’m okay, at least right now. That I might not be tomorrow. But I know the only direction I can go is forward. Onward.

That’s what today feels like. Not just remembering that she died, but realizing I’ve lived an entire year without her. That I woke up that first morning and somehow kept waking up every day after that.

Even when I couldn’t hold it together. Even when I didn’t want to.

[justagirl198310]

Dear Mom,

In about a month it will be a year since you died.

I still don’t know how that’s possible. A whole year of the world moving forward without you in it.

This past year has been overwhelming in ways I didn’t know a person could carry.

Everything blends together now. The shock. The grief. The exhaustion of just trying to exist in a world where you aren’t here anymore.

Some days I didn’t know how to function. Some days I couldn’t even get out of bed. Other days I got up because I didn’t have a choice. Forcing myself out of bed became a heroic effort.

There were a lot of days I didn’t know if I could do it. Not the big things — just the idea of living the rest of my life without you in it. That thought felt impossible sometimes.

It still does.

But the days kept coming.

And somehow I kept moving through them.

Taking care of the kids. Showing up when I could. Getting through the hours when grief felt like it was swallowing everything else.

Some mornings I still wake up and my body remembers those last days. The hospital. The waiting. That sick feeling in my stomach that something terrible was happening and I couldn’t stop it.

I don’t think people understand how much of that stays with you.

I miss you in a thousand different ways. In the big moments, but even more in the ordinary ones. The things I want to tell you. The conversations we should still be having.

This has been the hardest year of my life.

But I’m still here. I’m still trying.

Even on the days I don’t think I can do it… I do. Somehow.

Onward.

And I’m carrying you with me while I march.

I love you. I miss you every second of every day.

[justagirl198310]

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here. I checked and the last post was the day before Thanksgiving. That feels like a lifetime ago.

A lot has happened since then, and also somehow nothing has changed at all.

The holidays were strange this year. The first ones without Mom. There isn’t really a guidebook for that. I tried to keep some traditions going for the kids while also figuring out what grief looks like in real time. Christmas Eve I gave them keepsakes that belonged to her. The girls got jewelry boxes and Eli got a wooden memory box. I also got an ornament made for the tree with her name and the words “forever in our hearts.” Small things, but they felt important. Little anchors so she still has a place in our lives.

Grief doesn’t really move in a straight line though.

Some days feel almost normal. Other days it hits in ways I don’t expect. Lately mornings have been the hardest. I’ll wake up and before I even open my eyes my body is back in the ICU. The rushing. The waiting. That heavy nausea in my stomach. It’s like my brain hasn’t fully let go of those moments yet. Sometimes it passes quickly. Sometimes I have to get up and reset because my whole nervous system feels like it’s buzzing.

It’s strange to be coming up on a year and still feel like part of me is stuck in those hours.

Today, Eli and I did something that felt really meaningful though. We got tattoos for her.

He chose a carnation because it was her favorite flower. Mine is an arrow with a peacock feather. Peacocks were always her thing. The feather sits at the back of the arrow, like fletching, because that’s how it feels carrying her now. Her spirit is still part of the force pushing me onward.

Her birthday was this week too. The first one where she wasn’t here. The kids and I got her favorite coffee and later we’ll had the double chocolate cake she loved. It’s not the same, but it felt right to mark the day somehow.

There have been other things coming up lately too. Old memories. Old dynamics. Pieces of the past that look very different now that I’m older and can see them more clearly. Some of that has been uncomfortable. Some of it has been heartbreaking for the younger version of me who didn’t have the context or language to understand what was happening.

But I’ve also been thinking a lot about resilience.

Not the shiny inspirational kind people like to talk about. The real kind. The kind that looks like getting up every day even when your nervous system is still stuck somewhere in the past. The kind that looks like raising three teenagers while carrying grief in your bones. The kind that looks like slowly learning to have compassion for the person you were when you were just trying to survive.

Life right now is messy.

Heavy sometimes.

Quiet other times.

But there are still small things that feel steady. Coffee with the kids. Flowers from my mom’s garden blooming again. Tattoos that carry meaning.

Somehow we keep going. 🖤

[justagirl198310]

I keep waiting for the breakdown to show up, but all I feel is this weird numbness. It’s like the tears are right there under the surface but stuck behind a wall I never asked for. We pulled out the tree today and all I could think about was how we’re only decorating one this year. No going to my mom’s, no helping her with hers. That should’ve knocked the air out of me, but I just kept fluffing branches and laughing with the kids because they were excited and I didn’t want to ruin it.

Later I was in the kitchen heating up dinner and it hit me that normally I’d already have tomorrow’s dish prepped and sitting in the fridge, ready to take to her house. This year there’s nothing to get ready for.

Tomorrow is going to be quiet in a way I’m not used to. I keep thinking about the years when I didn’t want to be alone and her house was where I went because she was always there. Now it’s just me trying to figure out how to sit with that kind of silence without falling straight through it.

I notice all of this. I see the moments for what they are. But I still don’t break open. I don’t feel the thing I know is sitting somewhere inside me. I just keep moving through it, flat and a little hollow, hoping it still counts as coping and not avoiding. Tomorrow will come whether I’m ready or not. Maybe it’ll hit me, maybe it won’t. I’m just trying to be okay with wherever I land.

[justagirl198310]

We went to the drive-through Christmas lights tonight. First year doing it without my mom. She went with us the year it opened. Maybe not last year, I can’t remember anymore, but even if she didn’t go, I still would’ve called her before and after. I would’ve sent every picture, every little video. That’s what I keep bumping into.. these tiny routines I didn’t realize were routines until they were gone.

It was cute. We laughed. The kids argued over which parts were their favorite. Life kept going in that normal way it does. But there was still that quiet feeling in my chest, the one that shows up at random and won’t sit still. The fun doesn’t erase it. It just rides along.

Lately I keep thinking, I don’t want to do this.

Any of it.

Not the holidays, not the pretending-everything-is-normal, not the first-year-without-her reality.

I want to skip it. Bury my head until January and come back out when the world feels less sharp. But I can’t. I’ve got three kids who need some kind of rhythm to hold onto, and that means I have to try. Even when all I want is to turn the lights off and be left alone.

We lost three important people this year. And honestly, four, if you count my sister being gone from our lives. So now it’s just the four of us in this house, trying to figure out what traditions still fit, what memories hurt too much, and what we’re supposed to do with all these firsts we never asked for.

It’s a lot.

But I’m doing it anyway, even when every part of me whispers, I don’t want to do this.

[justagirl198310]

The past couple weeks have felt heavier than they should. Like I’m moving through regular life with something sitting on my chest, slowing everything down, making every small task feel bigger than it is.

Parenting has been a lot… trying to hold boundaries, trying to manage the blowups, trying to keep the house steady while everyone’s emotions take turns crashing. And I’m doing it all with that quiet ache in the background, the one that doesn’t say anything out loud but still pulls at me all day. It’s always there, even when I’m not talking about it. Especially then.

The political noise, the rumors, the fear about where this country is headed , it all hits harder lately. Not because the news is worse than usual, but because I’m already worn thin. I’m fact-checking things with a mind that feels frayed, scrolling through chaos with a heart that’s already carrying too much.

Burnout moves differently now. I feel it in my bones. People keep sending advice and articles like it’s something I can action my way out of, but some days even thinking feels like dragging myself through mud. Life hasn’t slowed down to match what’s missing from it.

And all the normal stuff — the chores, the car arguments, the endless decisions, the constant need to be the one who thinks ahead — it all stacks up faster. Not because the tasks themselves changed, but because everything happens in the space she used to occupy. Even the silence feels different. Even the air in the house has a tiredness to it.

I still catch myself trying to reach for her without thinking. A question, a thought, a moment I want to share and then I remember. It hits quick and quiet, like a door shutting somewhere in the distance. No big collapse, just a flicker of emptiness that follows me through the rest of the day.

It’s strange how you can keep going, working, parenting, worrying about the world, picking up after everyone, and underneath all of it, there’s this steady pull you don’t name out loud. A shadow that doesn’t demand attention but never lets go either.

I don’t really have a point. I just needed to put down that I’m tired, and not just from life being life. There’s an absence stitched into everything right now, and I’m learning how to live around it without pretending it isn’t there.

I’m still moving. Just slower. Just heavier. But still here.

[justagirl198310]

Some days the grief isn’t quiet. It doesn’t whisper. It roars. It claws up my throat and makes me gag on the silence she left behind.

Some days the birds can shut the hell up. The wind can go still. The sun can stop pretending anything is okay. How dare the world keep turning like it didn’t just lose her.

Some days I scream. Not out loud—my throat won’t open wide enough—but inside, I am screaming. Furious. Desperate. Unhinged. I want to tear open the sky with my bare hands and demand the universe return her. Right. Fucking. Now.

I want to stomp my feet like a child and throw the kind of tantrum the gods can’t ignore. I want them to feel how wrong this is. I want them to choke on their own cruelty for taking her from me.

I don’t want comfort. I don’t want signs or dreams or spirit talk. I want her back. I want her skin, her smell, her voice in my goddamn ears. I want her at my table, in my arms, on the other end of the phone saying something ordinary that I’d give everything to hear again.

I want to tell her, “I can’t do this without you,” and hear her say, “Then don’t—you don’t have to.” But she can’t. Because she’s gone. And no amount of wind or light or whispered wisdom will make that any less brutal.

Some days, I don’t just drown. I go under with fists clenched and lungs burning, fighting the tide with everything I’ve got, and losing anyway.

Some days, I want to set the whole goddamn universe on fire just to make it feel this grief. To make it answer for what it stole.

[justagirl198310]

I still feel this so hard.

[justagirl198310]

I’ve been raw since Halloween. Maybe it’s the holidays approaching, maybe it’s just that life keeps moving and grief keeps living in me. Seven months in and the ache hasn’t softened. I miss my mom so much. She’s in the quiet corners of every day, behind every laugh, every step outside, every ordinary moment. Her absence colors everything, makes everything half-happy, half-empty.

Today I took the girls on the fall walk I promised. I didn’t want to go. Every part of me wanted to stop, to stay still, to hide from the world and the ache. But we went anyway. The air was sharp, the leaves loud with fire. I took pictures through my sunglasses, using them like a filter. Life feels like that now. Everything passes through this lens of loss. Everything is shaded by her absence. But somehow, with the filter on, it becomes beautiful anyway.

The trees are letting go of all they’ve held all year. Bare branches, bright leaves falling. And I watch them, thinking about how they lose everything and still return, changed, alive, enduring. I want to learn that kind of resilience. I want to believe that even when life feels filtered through grief, even when everything is half-happy, I can still rise. Like the trees. Like I am meant to.

Autumn shows me that endings aren’t forever. The breaking is part of becoming. And maybe, just maybe, I will bloom again.

[justagirl198310]

I’m still here, quietly grieving while the world keeps piling more and more on. I think about her every day. I still catch myself reaching for the phone when something happens I would have told her about—some small story, a bit of news, the kind of nothing that used to mean everything.

Almost seven months now. I used to mark time in Fridays, each one a reminder of the day everything changed. But I’ve lost track somewhere along the way. Maybe it’s mercy. Maybe it’s exhaustion.

Tonight I sat down and actually counted. It’s been 196 days without her. That number shouldn’t mean more than the others, but somehow it does. I had her for 15,160 days—fifteen thousand one hundred sixty mornings where her voice existed in my world.

And yet 196 without her feels impossible. Some days it feels like she was here just last Friday. Other days it feels like she’s been gone forever. I still reach for her somewhere between those Fridays, somewhere between memory and missing.

[justagirl198310]

The full moon feels different this time. She died under a full moon, so every one since has carried that weight… the reflection, the ache, the way the sky itself seems to remember. Usually it drags the grief up with it, pulling everything I’ve tried to bury back to the surface.

But tonight it’s softer. Maybe it’s the new album (you know which one).. something about it is so bright, so relentlessly alive, that even the moon seems to have caught the mood.

For once, the heaviness doesn’t win. For once, I’m not orbiting loss. I am singing. I am smiling at the onyx night and looking forward to Opalite skies. I am letting something good infect the space where the grief usually lives.

And that feels strange—not wrong, but strange—because I’ve built a rhythm around sorrow. It’s weird to feel the beat change and realize I’m allowed to move with it.

Maybe it’s temporary. Maybe tomorrow, the gravity will pull again. But tonight, under this full moon, the same kind of moon that watched her leave, the music is louder than the mourning. And that feels like some kind of miracle.

[justagirl198310]

[justagirl198310]

I’m writing this late — or not-writing it, really. I’ve been meaning to get this down since before the last funeral but I kept finding things to do instead: calls, forms, appointments, fights, the stupid little tasks that scream louder than the actual grief. Procrastination isn’t new to me. This kind of procrastination is new: it’s the kind that swallows the whole day and spits out nothing.

This was the third loss. First my mom. Then Grandma. Then another grandma, each one stacked on top of the last until my days blurred into paperwork and phone calls and trying to remember whether bills were paid. I thought the crises would come and go, that I’d survive them and come out the other side. Instead they kept arriving like more rooms collapsing in a house I was supposed to be holding together.

I am exhausted in a way I can’t map. I forget things I never forgot. I lose appointments, forget to reply to messages, let the tiny, important stuff slide until it becomes huge. I’ve always procrastinated — that voice in the back of my head that says “later” — but before, “later” mostly worked. I could pull it together at the last minute. Now the last minute is late. Or I don’t go at all. I miss deadlines. I don’t show up the way I used to. It’s humiliating and terrifying in equal measure.

Most of my energy goes into existing. Not thriving. Not even functioning like I used to. Just existing. Getting the kids to school, keeping the house from tipping into chaos, answering the phone when someone needs something… these things drain me until there’s nothing left for anything else. I look at the list — the list that’s attached to my head like a low-grade buzzing — and my body goes limp. Overwhelmed is a small word for what that is.

I keep thinking about what would be different if she were here. My mom. I don’t mean “fix everything.” I mean the simple things: the presence, the permission, the person who would know which of these tiny emergency fires needed my attention and which I could let burn a little. There’s a hollow where her voice should be telling me the obvious things I can’t hear right now. I replay moments and wish for one more small ordinary conversation. I wish she could see the mess so she could also see me … and maybe tell me I’m not failing.

And yes — anger sits under the grief. It’s loud some days. It tastes like injustice. It shows up when I open an account statement that’s missing money, when I catch the small betrayals, when I stand at a funeral and feel everyone acting like nothing changed. You learn fast who will carry with you and who will carry only their version of the story. That kind of bitter clarity is its own kind of wound.

I am writing this because I have not been writing. Because every time I try to explain it out loud it comes out thin or angry or apologetic. This entry is late and messy and not finished — like everything else right now. But I want to mark it down: I am tired. I am not fine. I am trying. I am still here.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll do the thing I keep putting off. Maybe I won’t. Right now I am giving myself this: the admission that I’m exhausted, the permission to be incompetent sometimes, and the small, stubborn wish that if only for a minute, my mom would come sit with me so I didn’t have to be the one to hold the whole collapsing house.

[justagirl198310]

Some people don’t just steal things.

They steal trust, they steal peace, they steal the last shred of faith you had in them.

That cuts deeper than anything they pocket.