When Grief Comes Back Around 1/24/26

There are moments when you think something is done. Worked through. Processed. Integrated. Filed away neatly under things you’ve already handled. And then life comes along and taps the bruise. Maybe it doesn’t hit hard right away, or it doesn’t feel dramatic, but something brushes you just enough to remind you that another layer of healing was waiting underneath.

That’s what happened to me recently, and the trigger itself was not a big deal on paper. It was practical and logistical, and almost boring if viewed from a fly-on-the-wall perspective. One of my kiddos told me they don’t want to travel to see extended family next summer. The flight is too long. The city feels overwhelming. They don’t want to leave Alaska for that long during the summer. The reasons were clear ones. Thoughtful ones. And somehow, it completely leveled me.

Not because it was wrong or because I disagreed. Not because of the logistics, but because that clarity brushed up against something very old and very tender in me. I’ve carried grief for a long time around family and distance, around the life my children didn’t grow up inside of. Cousins they don’t really know. A sense of shared history that never quite formed. A community that lived somewhere else, in another geography. It almost feels like another timeline at this point...

I’ve worked with this grief. I’ve named it, and I’ve made peace with it—or at least I thought I had. What I hadn’t fully named, until this moment, was what lived underneath it. I don’t believe I was incapable as a parent, but something in me felt inadequate for them. A quiet, persistent feeling that I was being asked to be everything, and I couldn’t meet that expectation.

I’ve always believed in the village, not as a romantic ideal or some spiritualized fantasy, but as something deeply practical. Kids benefit from many perspectives, many skill sets, and many ways of being human. They benefit from seeing different adults navigate the world in different ways. They benefit from not having everything filtered through one nervous system. And I knew this—because I was beginning to get to know myself—that my children would have been enriched by access to more than just mine. Once I really understood myself, it became clear what I could offer naturally and what didn’t come easily. I didn’t need to be all things, but when the culture quietly insists that you should be—when all the responsibility collapses onto one or two parents—it creates a kind of pressure that feels unnatural.

There were skills my kids needed that didn’t come instinctively to me. And expecting that I should somehow compensate for that felt like too much. So the longing for community wasn’t nostalgia. It was realism. Still, I genuinely thought I had worked through this, which is why it surprised me how fast my mind snapped backward when this came up. It was like it had been waiting for an opening, quietly replaying old choices, and recounting perceived mistakes. It was like I had an internal narrator rattling off: “What if I had known myself better when I was younger? If I had chosen differently? If I had stayed closer to my family? If I had left here? If I had rooted somewhere else?”

The spiral itself didn’t last very long. That’s one of the real fruits of long-term inner work—not that you don’t fall, but that the distance between falling and returning gets shorter. Still, my body needed time. The grief came in little waves until I shut down one evening. I went to bed early. I let myself be quiet and didn’t try to fix it. I didn’t rush to reframe it into something productive or inspiring. Alongside the sadness, there was also irritation. A kind of being pissed at myself for still circling this territory. For not knowing who I was when I was young. For having spent long unsure hours deferring, consulting, and second-guessing myself.

And then something else started to surface.

When I was a kid, we grew up without permission. Most of us weren’t raised by adults who asked what felt safe in our bodies. No one was particularly curious about helping us discover our nervous systems, our thresholds, our internal “yes” and “no”. We weren’t taught to orient toward ourselves. We were taught to adapt to others. And I spent much of my adult life this way. In that context, it makes sense that knowing what you want isn’t automatic. It has to be learned. (Sometimes painfully. Sometimes late.)

Ironically, this is something I do my best to give my children. From the time they were little, I invited choices, preferences. “Apples or bananas?” I asked. “This way or that way?” I was intuitively wiring them to listen inwardly because I had learned, through my own challenges, how much that matters. And now here are my children, honoring their own limits. Big cities don’t feel good. Long travel feels like too much. I have to remember that clarity isn’t a rejection. It’s a skill. Seeing it this way softened something in me. Instead of staying anchored to what I didn’t know then, I began to see what’s opening now. My kids are almost grown. They’re flying. And for the first time, I get to step back into my own life with the self-knowledge I didn’t have when I was young. That feels like a gift.

So I ask a different question. Not why does this hurt, but what is it generating? What is this experience asking of me? Not to fix or override or bypass, but to feel and integrate?

What I found underneath the sadness was deeper honesty about my own longing for connection. A recognition that this wound around family and belonging has been a teacher in my life, not a flaw. And I get to honor that need within myself while also having a renewed commitment to stay open-hearted with my children, even when their autonomy brushes up against my ache.

I’m not interested in shutting my heart down to avoid pain. I love them too much for that. And this is less about them and more about an old place in me asking to be met again. This time, with less self-judgement and more maturity, more compassion. Because some grief doesn’t disappear; it changes shape. It revisits us at new thresholds, asking to be held in a new way, with the nervous system we have now—not the one we had then. So, this time, instead of turning into stone by looking back, I’m choosing to stay oriented forward. To let the sadness inform me without defining me, and apply what these experiences have taught me in the moment I’m actually in.

This, for me, is what growth really looks like.

Are you going through something similar? Please reach out for a free consultation. I look forward to connecting with you.