Father’s Day arrives whether you’re ready or not. The store displays go up two weeks early, ties, grills, “World’s Best Dad” mugs and you walk past them like nothing’s wrong, because nothing is wrong, not really. He’s just not here to buy a gift for.
You notice who still calls to ask if you’re okay. You notice the people who forget, too, and you don’t hold it against them, because how would they know June has this shape now.
Some years you’ll see his handwriting on something, a report he wrote, a check stub, a name on the back of a photo — and the day cracks open for ten minutes before it closes again.
That’s most of what enduring looks like. Not a single hard moment you brace for and survive. A hundred small ones, scattered through an ordinary day, that you didn’t see coming.
Most years it gets easier to carry, not because the missing shrinks but because you get stronger arms.
And there’s a strange comfort in the fact that the day still catches you off guard. It means the love hasn’t worn down to nothing. The ache is just what’s left standing where he used to stand.
I saw it on Facebook first. Maria, 49 years old, gone. The kind of news that stops you mid-scroll, that you read twice because you need to. A few minutes later, my daughter texted me from Amsterdam. She knew. Maria was someone that touched my daughter as well.
I sat with that for a moment. Maria, who I’d met through a friend, whose daughter grew up alongside mine from kindergarten. Maria, who had this warmth about her, this strength you could feel just being in the same room with her. A daughter, sister, wife, mother, aunt, friend . A physical trainer, a spin instructor, someone who spent her life getting other people to believe they were capable of more than they thought.
A few days before she passed, I sent her a message. I’m praying for you Maria, sending you love. She never answered. I found out later she was already beyond that. I keep thinking about that message sitting there, and I don’t know what to do with that.
When I heard she was sick again, something in me recognized the pattern. I reached out because I wanted to give her strength, the way I wished I could have given more to someone else I loved. I wanted to show up. And then I didn’t, not the way I meant to, and now I can’t.
I went to the viewing. That was as much as I could carry. Standing there, looking at her face, I said what I needed to say and I left.
A friend of hers who attended the service shared something afterward. Their priest had read a poem, “The Dash” by Linda Ellis, about the small line on a gravestone between the birth date and the death date. That dash is your whole life. Everything you did, everyone you loved, every ordinary Tuesday and every moment that mattered, all of it compressed into a mark so small you could miss it.
I read that and I had to put my phone down.
In 49 years, Maria filled that dash completely. She spent her life moving, getting other people to move with her, to push past what they thought they could do. She gave her warmth to anyone who needed it. She raised two children. She loved her husband. She showed up, over and over, for so many people. The outpouring after her death, the sheer number of people whose lives she touched, I had no idea, and yet somehow I’m not surprised. That was exactly who she was.
What her death did, the thing I wasn’t prepared for, was open up the loss of my friend Liz again.
Liz was my soul sister. We met as first-time mothers, young and overwhelmed and figuring it out together, and we never stopped talking after that. Deep conversations, buckets of laughter, the kind of friendship where you can say anything. She battled cancer more than once and every time she came back fighting, quietly, with so much dignity. When she died in August 2023, I wrote about her here because I didn’t know what else to do with the grief.
I thought I had learned to carry it. I hadn’t. I’d just learned to walk with it.
Two women. Both fighters. Both mothers. Both gone far too soon. One who knew every corner of my heart, and one I was just beginning to know, who I liked so much, who I kept thinking I’d have more time with. Grief, I’ve learned, doesn’t ask how close you were. It just arrives.
Both Liz and Maria’s children are still here. That’s the part that stays with me, that settles in and won’t move. These children, who still need their mothers. Who will always need their mothers.
I’m still here too. Still writing my dash, still trying to make it worth something. Still carrying the people I’ve loved and the people I didn’t get enough time with.
Both of them showed me how.
“Here’s to the tears of friendship. May they crystallize as they fall and be worn as gems in the memory of those we love.”
— Christina Applegate, You With the Sad Eyes: A Memoir
If you’re reading this, you’re still writing your dash too. I’d love to hear who you’re carrying with you.
Anxiety doesn’t knock. It doesn’t announce itself or wait for a convenient moment. It just shows up, in the middle of a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, in the quiet space between one thought and the next, in the chest, in the stomach, in the place behind your eyes where the pressure builds before you even have a name for what’s happening.
I know this feeling well. And lately, it has been showing up more than I would like.
I am someone who presents well. I walk into rooms, I engage, I show up for the people I love. From the outside, nothing looks wrong. That is the thing about anxiety that nobody talks about enough, it is almost entirely invisible. You can be sitting at a dinner table, laughing at something, and simultaneously feel like the walls are closing in. You can look completely fine and feel completely undone.
That disconnect is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it.
Anxiety has many faces. For some people it’s a racing heart and a sense of immediate dread. For others it is quieter, a low hum of worry that never fully goes away, a tendency to catastrophize, a mind that will not stop running through every possible thing that could go wrong. Sometimes it is both, depending on the day.
Where does it come from? That is the question I keep asking myself. Some of it is the accumulation of loss, grief has a long tail and it touches everything. Some of it is the uncertainty that comes with this season of life, the questions that don’t have answers yet. Some of it is just the world, which asks a lot of us right now. And some of it, if I am honest, comes from inside, from a nervous system that has been running on high alert for so long it has forgotten what calm feels like.
There are things that help. Movement helps, not for weight, not for any other reason, just for the way it pulls you back into your body and out of your head. Breathing, real deliberate breathing, helps more than I ever wanted to admit because it sounds too simple to work and yet it does. Talking helps, when you have someone safe to talk to. Prayer helps.
But I want to be honest with you. These things manage it. They don’t cure it. There are still mornings I wake up with that weight already sitting on my chest before I have done anything to deserve it. There are still days when I do everything right and the anxiety shows up anyway. And on those days I don’t have a solution. I just have the willingness to keep going anyway.
I think that is what nobody tells you about anxiety. It is not something you fix once and move on from. It is something you learn to live alongside. Some seasons it quiets down. Some seasons it gets louder. Right now, for me, it’s loud.
And I am writing about it anyway. Because I know I am not the only one sitting with this. Because somewhere someone is reading this at 2am feeling completely alone in it, and I want them to know they are not.
When we are young, trust is effortless. We give it without thinking, without conditions, without fear. There is a beautiful innocence in that, one most of us don’t fully appreciate until life teaches us otherwise. Until someone mishandles what we gave them so freely. That is the moment trust stops being something we give and becomes something we guard.
At some point, most of us learn the hard way that not everyone deserves our trust. We give it too freely, to the wrong people, and then we spend a long time recovering from what that cost us. That part, most of us eventually figure out.
What takes so much longer is learning to trust ourselves.
I have watched smart, capable, deeply intuitive women talk themselves out of what they already knew. Myself included. We feel something. That low hum in the gut that says this isn’t right, or this person isn’t who they’re presenting themselves to be, or this is going to cost you. And instead of listening, we reason our way around it. We find explanations. We give the benefit of the doubt. We tell ourselves we’re being too sensitive.
And then, later, we find out we were right all along.
I think about how many times I have said that to myself. I knew. I knew and I didn’t listen.
The problem was never the instinct. It was the doubt.
We call it a gut feeling for a reason. Science has actually proven it is real. Your body knows things before your mind does. That quiet unease, that sudden certainty you cannot explain, that is your instinct communicating with you. It is not your imagination. It is not you being dramatic. It is the most honest voice in the room and it belongs to you.
We have just spent so many years being told otherwise. Too emotional. Too sensitive. Too quick to read into things. After a while you start to believe it. You start treating your own instincts like they need someone else’s approval before they count.
They don’t.
The gut doesn’t tell you what you want to hear. It doesn’t keep the peace or protect anyone’s feelings. It just tells you the truth, quietly, early, before the evidence shows up and before you can fully explain it to anyone else. That knowing is one of the most authentic things about you. It has always been there. You just have to decide to stop talking over it.
The more you listen, the clearer it gets. And the clearer it gets, the less you find yourself standing somewhere wondering how you ended up there again.
Trust doesn’t only belong in the space between you and other people. It starts here. With you. With that quiet voice you have been second-guessing for years.
When do we finally see ourselves? Not the flaws, not the things we’d change, but really, truly see ourselves. I have been asking myself that question a lot lately. And honestly, I don’t have the answer yet.
I have always cared about the way I look. That’s just the truth about me. The way I carry myself, the way I walk into a room, it has always mattered to me. For a long time that felt like a strength. What I didn’t see coming was that the same woman who cared so deeply would one day find aging so hard to sit with. Because it is hard. Some mornings I look in the mirror and I genuinely don’t recognize the face looking back at me. The lines. The changes. Everything quietly different from what it used to be. And I have to just stand there and absorb it.
Nobody prepares you for that feeling.
There’s a saying that youth is wasted on the young. I thought I understood it. I didn’t. Not until I started looking back at old photographs and realized that the flaws I spent so much time focusing on barely existed. I went straight to the flaw every single time. My body, my face, whatever it was that day. The good was right there and I kept walking past it. The real story, the one that was actually happening, I missed it completely.
I see it now in my daughter. She is so beautiful it is almost hard to look at sometimes. And she doesn’t see it. She finds the same things I found, the same flaws that aren’t really there, the same quiet criticism of herself that I know so well. I want to take her face in my hands and tell her to see herself right now, please. Because one day she is going to look back and wonder how she ever doubted what she had.
I know because that is exactly what happened to me.
And so here I am, on the other side of that, struggling with a different mirror. That’s the part that gets me. I wasn’t fully happy with myself then and I’m working hard to be happy with myself now. So when? When do we get to just be okay with what we see? When does that become something we actually feel and not just something we tell ourselves?
I want to be clear about something because I think it matters. I am not here to tell anyone how to handle this. I am not a proponent of one path or another. Age naturally, do something about it, whatever makes you feel like yourself. That is entirely your own business and it deserves no one’s judgment, including mine. Getting older is different for every single person. Every man, every woman. We all carry it differently. We all have our own quiet negotiations with who we are becoming.
What I am doing is trying to figure out my own path. What it looks like to genuinely feel good about myself now, a woman in her 50s and soon….in my sixties, and in my seventies. Not out of vanity. Not out of fear. But because I deserve to finally look at myself with the same kindness I have always been willing to give to everyone else.
That is the real journey for me. Finding the true woman underneath all of it. The one who has loved deeply and lost people she didn’t know how to survive losing, and survived. The one who has shown up when it was hard. She has been here the whole time.
