My daughter was home for her father’s birthday, and we just dropped her back at school. After she left, I cleaned her room. Then I closed the door.

I keep it closed. It’s too painful to see her room without her in it.

She’s a junior in college now, and by the third year I was supposed to have figured this out. That was the unspoken deal. You cry through the first semester, and by junior year you’ve found your purpose. A business, a degree, a cause. Something of your own.

People assume I’ll go back to broadcast journalism, the career I left to raise her. I won’t. Every part of me says that chapter is behind me, and I want something completely different. I don’t know yet what it is or how to find it. But every day I push myself to feel secure where I am, and most days I remember how blessed I am.

I’m still waiting. The door is still closed.

I know she’s doing great. She’s fine. I miss her anyway, with an ache I can’t explain to anyone who hasn’t been here. I miss her face, her real face across the kitchen in the morning, not on a screen.

Some nights I open Life360 just to see the little dot that shows where she is. On an ordinary day, that’s the closest I get to her. It tells me where she is. It can’t tell me how she is.

I admire women who are full-time mothers, and women who manage full-time careers and motherhood at once. I couldn’t do both. So I chose the one that mattered most, and that was my daughter. She still is. She always will be.

Now she’s grown, and the job I chose is done. I’m truly grateful to watch her out in the world, finding her footing. And still, without her, I feel lost.

Some women reach this point and simply move forward. They’re in a good place, building the next part of their lives, and I’m glad for them. That isn’t me. Not yet.

On the hardest days, it feels like a whiteout. The light is so bright I can’t see the horizon or tell which way is forward. That’s the closest I can come to explaining lost.

Missing your child is hard enough. Then a second voice shows up to tell you you’re doing it wrong. Too much, for too long. Why can’t you let go? Why aren’t you doing more? I’d never talk to a friend that way. Most days, I talk to myself that way.

So I’m practicing something else. We don’t all cope the same way, and we aren’t meant to. One woman’s solution is another woman’s dead end.

Part of the difference is where I come from. In my Afghan family, closeness was the furniture of daily life. We lived near each other, ate together, and knew each other’s days without asking. Girls didn’t leave home until they married. It was old-fashioned, but it was how I grew up. Raising a daughter who would pack up and go away to college meant doing something the women before me never did. So when she did exactly what I raised her to do, I had no map for this goodbye.

I’ll say the harder thing too. Some days the sadness runs deep, and my health doesn’t always give me the energy I want. The missing makes the sadness heavier, and the sadness makes the missing louder. Still, I fight my way through.

I don’t fight alone. I have women in my life who make me feel I’m enough exactly as I am. They hold my hand when things are hard and applaud when things are good. Growing older has taught me how much that matters: friends who walk with you through each chapter and don’t need you to have it all figured out. That sisterhood is a big part of how I’m finding my way back to myself.

And I come from strong women. My father was a diplomat at the United Nations, and my parents came here planning to go home when his posting ended. Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and there was no home to go back to. My mother raised us in a country that was never the plan and made sure every one of us went to college. Both my grandmothers, my aunts, and my cousins lost the lives they knew and started over in foreign lands. If they could carry that, I can carry this.

My daughter is watching, too. Children do as you do, not as you say. If she sees me admit how hard this is and keep going anyway, that’s what she’ll remember.

If you feel it too, the loss and the pain and the pride all at once, you’re not the only one. That’s why I’m writing this. There are many of us standing in the same storm, and you’re not standing in it alone.