Grief is defined as a deep sorrow experienced after a significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person or pet. But grief is not limited to funerals and sympathy cards. Life is full of different griefs and joys, often woven tightly together.
In my life, I have grieved relationships that slowly unraveled, miscarriages that carried dreams I never got to hold, a marriage that once promised forever, jobs that shaped my identity, and the deaths of people who took pieces of my heart with them.
Some grief arrived like a storm — loud, violent, impossible to ignore. Other grief settled in quietly, like a fog, changing the landscape of my life before I even realized I was walking through it.Each loss altered me. Each one taught me something about love, about resilience, and about the fragile beauty of being human. When I was sixteen, I became a mother to a beautiful little girl.
She was my anchor — and that is a heavy role for a child to carry.
In my teenage heart, I romanticized the idea of a happy little family with her dad. I built a picture in my mind of us growing up together, figuring life out side by side, loving each other through the hard things. But that dream was never meant to be.
I grieved the relationship my teenage mind had created — not the reality, but the fantasy.I started a family in dysfunction. My daughter would not have a father present every day. I would not have the partner my heart longed for. And that knowledge — that quiet, undeniable truth — broke something inside of me.
It wasn’t just the loss of him.
It was the loss of what could have been.
The loss of innocence.
The loss of the story I thought we would live.
My strong, independent daughter taught me something I didn’t understand at sixteen.
You don’t need the fantasy.
You need growth.
I once believed a complete family had to look a certain way — mother, father, neat edges, happy endings. But life gave us something different. It gave us resilience. It gave us grit. It gave us each other.
I learned that love does not require perfection.That stability can be built, even when the foundation began cracked.
That strength can grow in places you once thought were ruined.
I set out afraid I was starting her life in dysfunction.
Instead, I raised a daughter who is resilient.
Independent.
Strong in ways I had to learn the hard way.
She did not need the fantasy family I once grieved.
She needed a mother willing to grow.
And somewhere along the way, we both did.
She is now a woman.
A college graduate.
Holding a full-time job.
A dog mom.
Independent. Capable. Grounded.
The little girl I once worried would grow up lacking something did not grow up lacking at all. She grew up watching perseverance. She grew up inside hard-earned strength. She grew up knowing that love shows up, even when life doesn’t look picture-perfect.
The fantasy I grieved at sixteen could never compare to the reality standing in front of me now.She is proof that broken beginnings do not determine beautiful outcomes.
And sometimes I realize — she was never my anchor.She was my evidence that we were going to be more than okay.
Grief taught me that not every loss is about death. Sometimes it is the quiet death of a dream, the letting go of a story you thought you would live. At sixteen, I mourned the family I imagined. I mourned the partner I would not have. I mourned the picture in my head.
But grief also became my teacher.Because in the absence of fantasy, I built strength. In the middle of dysfunction, I chose growth. And in raising my daughter, I discovered that love, resilience, and determination were more powerful than any picture-perfect plan.She is a thriving woman now — educated, independent, steady on her own feet. And I understand something I couldn’t have known back then:
What broke me at sixteen did not ruin us.
It refined us.
And sometimes the life you grieve is simply making room for the life that will make you proud.
Ebbs & Flows 