Duality: Gratitude + Grief on Mother’s Day

{Reflections & presence gifted to me through Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy}

Six years into motherhood, and still, the emotions don’t line up neatly in a row. They collide, they tangle, they flare up without warning. And this weekend—Mother’s Day—they do all of that at once.

Because while I get to hold one miracle in my arms, I also carry three others in my heart.

My living daughter calls me mom with joy and confidence. She wraps her arms around my neck like I’m her whole world. And that feeling is my absolute favorite. But my world? My heart? It’s forever split between presence and absence. I’m here. And also not whole. I am so grateful. And I am achingly incomplete.

This is the duality I live with. Every day, but especially today.

Mother’s Day doesn’t feel simple or solely celebratory. It feels layered - beautiful and brutal, heavy and light, soft in some parts and yet still so sharp around the edges. Because for every smile, every handmade card, every “I love you, Mommy,” there’s an echo of what could have been. There are three babies I never got to raise. Three names etched into the inside of my soul.

I’ve held their ultrasound photos and their ashes. I’ve kissed their memory and whispered apologies into the night. Even though I didn’t get to carry them in my arms, I have carried them in my heart since the moment I knew they existed. And somehow, I’ve continued forward, mothering the child in front of me while mourning the ones who live only in the stars.

This is what it means to be a loss mom and a living-child mom at the same time. It means holding a soft, clammy little girls hand in the grocery store while my heart breaks in places no one can see. It means blowing out birthday candles with a lump in my throat. It means crying in the bathroom after bedtime because the math of motherhood never adds up the way I imagined.

Motherhood, for me, has never been linear.

It has never been guaranteed.

Infertility and IVF taught me that. That wanting a baby with your whole heart doesn’t mean you’ll get to bring one home. That loss doesn’t always come with explanations or answers. That a positive pregnancy test is not a promise. That joy and devastation can exist in the exact same breath.

If you’re walking this complicated road too—if you’re celebrating and grieving, holding on and letting go, feeling grateful and gutted all at once—I want you to know this:

You’re not broken.

You’re not alone.

You are loving the babies you can hold and the ones you can’t in the most sacred, tender, courageous way possible.

And even if today doesn’t look like brunch and flowers and framed handprints, it is still your day.

Because you’re mothering with your whole heart. In memory. In motion. In mourning. In miracle.

And that? That is worth everything.