When she lived with me, I knew her life. The shape of her days, the small things, what was on her mind.
I still want that. I want to be the person she tells. Maybe because she’s my only child. Maybe because somewhere along the way, she became my whole life.
I know this longing from the other side, too. I wish I’d spent more time with my mother. Really enjoyed her. Breathed her in. As a child, you think your parents will be here forever. You know people die, but that feels so far away. You don’t realize how fast it happens. The same way you don’t realize how fast your child grows up.
That’s the beauty of life, and the saddest part of it.
If you’re a mother who knows this longing, you’re not the only one.
Little Birds
Something in me has gone quiet,
further down than sleep.
I stand at the window of my own life
and can't find the latch
to let myself back in.
The house is the same size.
It only feels bigger.
Her door stays open
because closing it would mean something.
Little birds learn to fly.
That was always the plan.
I showed her the sky myself,
pointed at it for years,
said go.
And she went,
far, the way they do.
I still want the small things,
the calls about nothing,
her days told back to me.
I didn't know what my elders were to me
until I'd lived long enough
to count who was left.
She'll learn it the same way.
I only have to still be here.
Nobody tells the mother bird
what to do with the nest after.
So I do what mothers do.
I keep the branch warm.
I listen for wings.
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.
My uncle has been gone for years. We drove out to California from Las Vegas to see his wife, his two kids, grown and married now, and their kids. Losing him never meant losing them.
One evening we went up into the canyon above Malibu and stopped at an overlook. There’s a bench up there and a tree the wind has pushed sideways. Purple sage was blooming along the edge of the pavement. The ocean was flat and hazy all the way out, and the sun was going down behind the ridge.
I paint water. I do it alone, usually from a photo, and I can spend a long time on one color. Standing up there was different. I was between my father’s sister and my father’s brother, looking at the same thing they were looking at. The ocean wasn’t better than the water at home. I just wasn’t by myself.
That’s most of what this trip was.
My uncle lives in Las Vegas, my aunt came from Virginia, I came from New York. The plan was to be in the same house.
My cousins and I grew up scattered. We were refugees, so the family landed in different countries, not different towns. Our parents got everyone into one house once or twice a year for a few days, sometimes a week, and that was how we knew each other. It doesn’t sound like enough. It was.
We’re still close. My cousins’ wives are lovely and welcoming. The kids didn’t hold back either. They were curious about everything, affectionate, wanting to be in the middle of whatever the adults were doing, and by the third day I had something of my own going with each one of them.
I want that for Sophia. I want her to know her cousins’ kids and her nieces and nephews well enough to recognize them anywhere. It doesn’t happen by itself. Most of us spend our time off somewhere new, a country we haven’t seen yet, and I do that too. But making the family the trip, on purpose, is what keeps everybody in each other’s lives. Nothing else holds. You book the flight, you cook for everyone, you put up with the noise, the way our parents did.
I want her to have the annoying part too. It’s easy to love family you see once a year for an afternoon. I want her to have the ones who get on her nerves and she goes back to anyway.
Her mattress never made it to her room. The mailroom turned it away, and FedEx took it back to the warehouse. The bed frame they accepted, in a box too big for her cubby, so the front desk propped it sideways against the wall behind them. She told us this on the phone, half laughing, half not knowing what to do about it.
We hadn’t seen her in six weeks. She’d been abroad all summer, home for two of them, then straight to Boston for her internship. The mattress was still sitting at the warehouse. She said she’d get it in an Uber, that people do it all the time. So we drove down. We’d have driven down for less.
Her dad carried it up and spent Saturday afternoon on her floor with an Allen wrench, working the frame together bolt by bolt.
We took her to dinner that night, brunch again the next day. She told us stories about people we’d never met like we already knew them. About her job. About the next co-op she’s already applying for, though she hasn’t finished this one. For those two days it felt almost like she’d never left.
Then we drove home, and the house was quiet the way it’s been quiet since she left, except now it was quiet with the specific shape of her missing from it.
I don’t think she misses us the way we miss her. It’s what’s supposed to happen. She has three roommates she loves, a schedule, a city that’s hers now, a life that doesn’t run through checking in with her mother every day. It shouldn’t. But I miss her in the ordinary hours. Cooking for two instead of three. Passing her room and seeing the door open onto nothing.
My husband says her new bed is too soft but that’s the way she likes it, roomy and cozy.
I think about that bed more than I probably should. That it’s holding her up at night in a city we don’t live in, in a room we only saw for two days, put together by the same hands that used to build blanket forts for her in the living room.
There is a kind of grace available to you right now, in this very moment — no perfect morning needed. Just a willingness to pause, breathe, and notice.
There is wisdom in the pause.
Starting your day sitting in gratitude with intention, allowing yourself to really feel it—invites one of the highest frequencies there is into your life.
Not for the big moments or the ones worth celebrating, just for this—-the breath in your body, the ground beneath your feet, the simple grace of still being here.
There’s something almost sacred about real gratitude. Not the kind you perform, but the kind that finds you — in the way morning light falls soft across a room, in that first sip of something warm, in the simple miracle of an ordinary day.
Here’s what we know — the words you speak and the thoughts you carry have energy. They shape the way you feel, the way you move through a room, the way your day unfolds. Choose them wisely. Choose them kindly. Especially the ones you say to yourself.
Gratitude is one of those choices. And it might just be the most powerful one you make all day. We don’t always get to choose what the day brings. But we get to choose how we meet it. Open hand, not clenched fist. You don’t need a ritual or a perfect morning or the right words. Just these two, meant sincerely, before the world asks anything of you: Say thank you.
And mean it.
This moment, this breath, this life — it’s all worth the gratitude.
