Style & Serenity

I chose this. That’s the part people miss.

I left a career to raise my daughter, and I would make the same choice again. It wasn’t a sacrifice I resented or a compromise I settled for. I loved being with my baby girl all day, every day. I also had amazing parents, always willing to spend time with her and give me time for myself, even if that was just a nap or a doctor’s appointment. For eighteen years I knew what I was doing and why, and there’s a particular kind of confidence that comes from that, from being the person who knows where everything is and what everyone needs and how the whole thing runs.

Then she left for college, exactly as planned, and the job ended.

Not failed. Ended. Successfully. She’s out there being capable and curious and kind, which was the entire point, and I’m proud in a way that doesn’t fit into a sentence.

And still, some mornings I sit with my coffee for two hours before I can move.

I’ve been careful about who I say that to, because I already know the answer I’ll get. Get a job. Take a class. Find a hobby. It comes from a good place and it misses entirely. This isn’t a scheduling problem. My days aren’t empty. I paint, I read , I cook, I keep a house running, I have a husband I like talking to and friends I’m lucky to spend time with. The hours are full. What’s missing isn’t an activity.

It’s that I built an entire self around a role, and the role is complete, and nobody tells you what to do with the self.

What I try to focus on is how strong all the women in my family are. I inherited that from them. It’s why I pick myself up and keep moving, doing, creating, connecting. Moving my body helps my mental state more than I expected it to. Some days that’s the whole accomplishment, staying upright, unbowed, not winning anything, just not going under. And still, after all of it, the feeling is there. There’s no word for it, so here’s the closest I can get: it’s grief. Not for a person. For a version of myself that had somewhere to be.

The other thing nobody prepares you for is the relationship. She isn’t gone. She’s just somewhere I’m not, doing things I don’t know about, and she tells me some of it and not all of it, which is correct. That’s the strange part. Every instinct I built over eighteen years says know where she is, and the actual work now is to not need to. She calls. She sends me pictures here and there. It’s real, it’s just smaller, and smaller isn’t worse, it’s only unfamiliar.

Kahlil Gibran wrote it long before I needed it:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,

Through, not from. I’ve read that a hundred times and only understood it this year. She was never mine to keep. She was mine to raise. Those are different jobs and I only signed up for one of them, I just didn’t read it closely enough at the time.

I don’t have a resolution for you. I’m not standing on the other side of this waving you across. I’m in it, most days managing it, some days sitting with cold coffee wondering what I’m for now.

But I’ve stopped treating that as a personal failure. There are a lot of us, women who did the work on purpose and did it well and are now standing in a quiet house trying to figure out who we are without the title. That’s not weakness and it isn’t something to fix with a to-do list. It’s just the part nobody warned us about.

If you’re there too, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just early.

I’d like to hear from the women who are further along than me. Not advice, I’m not looking for that. Just what it was actually like, and whether it got easier or only different. I’m asking because I don’t know yet.

Sometimes it comes without warning. A flood of tears, no clear trigger, nothing I can point to and say that’s what did it. I’ve always been an emotional person, crying comes easily to me, sometimes too easily. But this is different. This is the flood that catches even me off guard. And in the moment, I don’t always know why. What I do know is what comes after: relief. A kind of clearing.

For a long time that not-knowing unsettled me. When the tears started flowing, I wouldn’t run through a list of suspects. I’d just ask why. Why am I like this? What’s wrong with me? I have everything. A good life, people who love me, nothing to complain about. So why am I sitting here crying over nothing I can name?

Some of it, I think, is old. Things I’ve carried for years that don’t ask permission before they surface. I don’t always know which thread it’s pulling on, and I’ve stopped needing to know.

John O’Donohue, in his poem “For Grief,” writes about sorrow as something with its own intelligence, separate from ours:

All you can depend on now is that

Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.

More than you, it knows its way

And will find the right time

To pull and pull the rope of grief

Until that coiled hill of tears

Has reduced to its last drop.

I keep coming back to that image, the coiled hill of tears. It reframes the whole thing. Sorrow isn’t waiting for my permission or my explanation. It has its own timeline, its own logic, and it pulls when it’s ready, whether or not I’ve consciously processed whatever it’s attached to. Maybe especially when I haven’t.

There’s something to this beyond just feeling true. Tears born of emotion aren’t the same as tears from a sliced onion, the body makes them differently, and releases something different through them. After a real cry, there’s a calm that follows, an actual settling in the body, not just in the mind. That’s not me being poetic. The Greeks and Romans believed something close to this thousands of years ago, that tears worked like a release valve, carrying out whatever the body no longer had room to hold.

So maybe my body knows something before I do, and waits for the moments when nothing urgent is happening to finally let go.

I think a lot of us were raised to treat crying like a malfunction. Something to apologize for, explain, get under control as fast as possible. I used to wipe my face and say sorry before anyone had even asked what was wrong. Now I’m trying to let it just be a thing my body does, without needing a tidy reason attached to it.

That doesn’t mean every cry is mysterious. Sometimes I know exactly why. But the ones that arrive without warning, that don’t trace back to anything obvious, those used to scare me. Now they feel almost like trust. My body telling me it’s safe enough here to stop holding on so tightly.

If this has happened to you, the unexplained tears, the sudden wave with no clear source, you’re not broken and you’re not imagining it. Something in you found a moment it could finally use.

I’d love to hear if this is familiar.