Where the Light Used to Land, and Where It Finds Me Now

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

— Albert Camus

Grief isn’t always loud. Sometimes, it arrives like the first frost — silently, unexpectedly — touching everything with a cold you can’t explain. I’ve known grief in the sharp, soul-altering loss of my son. I’ve also felt it in quieter ways: the ache of looking in the mirror and not recognizing who I am anymore. After becoming a mother, I gained a world of love — but I also felt parts of myself fade, like wildflowers buried beneath the weight of new roots. Roots I didn’t choose, roots that grew too fast, too deep, reshaping the soil of who I thought I was. And as I’ve moved through life’s seasons, I’ve watched versions of myself wither, change, disappear — without fanfare, without goodbye.

Grief, I’ve learned, isn’t just about losing someone. Sometimes, it’s about losing yourself. Who you were before the storm. Who you thought you’d be by now. The dreams that didn’t survive the winter. The laughter that no longer echoes in the same way.

But nature has taught me that loss isn’t the end of the story. Even the most broken landscapes hold seeds. Even after fire, the forest remembers how to grow.

A reflection on the quiet kinds of grief — the ones that don’t always get named, but still shape us. The kind that arrives in waves, lingers in shadows, and asks us — gently, insistently — to begin again.

The First Uprooting

I became a mother at fifteen — not by plan, and not in the way girlhood ever dreams. One moment, I was tracing futures in soft pencil, full of light and possibility. The next, the earth beneath me split. The path I thought I’d walk vanished, and in its place grew a road I didn’t choose, lined with unfamiliar shadows.

There was grief, though I didn’t know its name back then. It lived in the silence after the world stopped asking about me. In the ache of watching my dreams fall like petals, too tender to survive the storm. I placed my son — my first — into the arms of another family, a choice rooted in love but steeped in sorrow. It was a giving and a letting go, both unbearable and necessary.

Something in me unraveled after that. I felt like a tree struck too young by lightning — still standing, but charred in places no one could see. I wasn’t just mourning a child I would no longer raise. I was mourning the girl I used to be. She slipped through my fingers without warning, without ceremony, without time to say goodbye.

I learned early that grief doesn’t always scream. Sometimes, it buries itself deep — in the soil of who we were — waiting for years before we’re brave enough to dig it up.

The Hollowing Years

When I became a mother again, I was older — but still lost. I held my son in my arms and felt both wonder and weight. I loved him with every part of me, but I could no longer find the “me” beneath the mother. My identity blurred under bottles and sleepless nights, lullabies and routines. I poured myself into raising him, and in doing so, I emptied parts I didn’t know were running dry.

There is a quiet grief in that kind of devotion — the kind that steals without stealing. I was there, present, nurturing, and still… disappearing. I looked in the mirror and saw someone I didn’t recognize. Not because she wasn’t strong, but because she had been rewritten by years of caretaking and compromise. The girl who once dreamed with open hands had learned to grip tightly — to schedules, to survival, to what little of herself remained.

And when my relationship ended, the foundation cracked again. I lost not just a partner, but the family shape I had clung to — the rhythm of everyday life with my son. Now he moves between homes, and while I know he is loved in both, there are nights when the house echoes too loudly with his absence. It is a different kind of loss — not death, but division. A grief of presence interrupted, of mothering in half-frames.

But even here, in this fragmentation, I’ve found small seeds of becoming. It’s a strange blessing — how absence makes us listen harder for our own voice.

The Quietest Goodbye

When I became pregnant again, something stirred in me — not just hope, but a kind of reckoning. I had already known the ache of letting go once before. I had already watched a piece of my heart walk into the world without me. But this time, I allowed myself to believe in a new beginning. I let myself imagine a life shaped differently — one where I could reclaim pieces of myself while welcoming someone new.

And then, suddenly, there was nothing.

No cry, no breath, no heartbeat to hold onto. Just silence. The kind that settles in your bones and doesn’t leave. Losing my son shattered me in a way words still struggle to carry. It was the sharpest grief, but also the most invisible. There was no nursery to pack away, no birthdays missed — only the echo of what could have been.

I walked through days with a hollow kind of strength, carrying love with nowhere to place it. People expected healing to follow time, but I learned that time doesn’t erase — it simply weathers. I became soil turned over too many times, trying to remember what once grew there.

Yet somehow, through the ache, something else began to take root. Fragile at first — like moss on stone — but alive. I don’t always recognize who I am now. I’m a collage of all the selves I’ve lost and all the ones still forming. There is grief in that… but also a strange kind of grace.

The Dream That Turned to Smoke

No one tells you that dreams can grieve you back. That becoming a mother — one of my deepest longings — could also become one of my heaviest sorrows. I wanted this. I ached for it. And yet, there are days it feels like a quiet unraveling. Like living inside a story that keeps rewriting itself without asking if you’re ready for the next chapter.

Some days, it’s the absence that crushes me — the weight of missing children I can’t hold, birthdays I don’t plan, questions I can’t answer. And some days, it’s the presence — the ache of raising a son in a world that doesn’t feel safe. A country that has shown me again and again that it was never built with him in mind. The grief of motherhood is layered: it’s love wrapped in fear, joy threaded with mourning.

I grieve for the ease I never had. For the peace I can’t seem to find. For the safety I can’t guarantee. Every day, I carry the invisible labor of trying to protect him from a world that wasn’t made to keep him whole.

And quietly, another kind of grief blooms — the kind that comes when dreams shift without permission. I find myself mourning the possibility of ever having more children. Not because the love has lessened, but because the world feels too sharp, too uncertain. Because I have learned how deeply motherhood wounds, and how little this country tends to those wounds. My body remembers what it means to lose. My heart remembers what it means to fight. And sometimes, I just don’t know if I have it in me again.

There’s a tenderness to this grief. It’s not loud. It’s not dramatic. But it lingers — in late-night thoughts, in quiet walks, in the ache of holding on and the fear of letting go.

And so I walk this path — carrying loss and love intertwined, roots tangled in grief and hope alike. Some days, I feel grounded; others, I am adrift, still searching for who I am beneath it all. There is no neat ending here, no final chapter wrapped in certainty. Instead, there is only the slow unfolding of self — a journey marked by absence and presence, by holding on and letting go, by growing even when the soil feels uncertain.

This is where I find myself now: not healed, not whole, but still breathing. Still trying. Still growing.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

— C.S. Lewis