Whatever Held

This is the first in a series of essays I’m writing to make sense of the last thirty years —
the illness, the divorce, the fight to keep my kids, and who we all became on the other side of it.

I didn’t picture it this way.
Somewhere in my head, before any of this started, there was a version of parenthood that looked like a nice house, a happy together family, easier times. Somewhere along the way that picture got traded for something else, courtrooms, hospital rooms, a body that kept failing me at the worst possible moments, and a version of myself I had to perform because the truth wasn’t safe to show.
I had melanoma treatment. Twice. I had kidney infections that turned into sepsis. I was tired in a way that isn’t really tired. It’s something closer to running on fumes for years at a time. And in the middle of all of it, I went straight from cancer treatment into divorce proceedings, where I had to look well when I wasn’t, because my ex was using my illness
as a weapon, telling the court I was too sick to keep my own children.
I don’t know which season was worse. I’ve stopped trying to rank them. What I know is that I was fighting on every front at once, my health, my marriage, my right to raise my own kids, and there wasn’t a lot of room left over to enjoy the parts of parenthood that were supposed to be easy. That’s its own kind of grief, separate from everything else:
mourning the version of those years I didn’t get to have, even while I was living through them.
But I kept them. And they grew up anyway. Somehow, in spite of everything I couldn’t give them in those years, they became exactly the kind of people I would have hoped for, if I’d let myself hope for anything back then.
My son was always the one who got it. Even young, he could read a room, read a person, understand what was underneath a situation before anyone explained it to him. That kind of perception isn’t something you can teach, it’s something that either survives a hard childhood or gets crushed by it. His survived. He came out the other side responsible and resilient, the kind of person who can hold weight without being broken by it.
My middle child is tough, genuinely, unmistakably tough. She pushes through things most people would stop for. She’s sharp, quick, capable. But I see what’s underneath the toughness too: I think sometimes she plays it up because she’s actually uncertain, because believing in herself doesn’t come as naturally to her as being strong does. If I could say one thing to her, it would be that she doesn’t have to keep proving the toughness. It’s already there. What I want for her now is the believing.
My baby girl came from real darkness, anxiety and depression that I watched her carry for years, the kind that makes every day an act of will. And now she’s a senior in college with multiple AA degrees already earned, creative and smart and so deeply empathic it sometimes seems like she feels things for other people before they’ve even named the feeling themselves. Watching her go from barely holding on to genuinely thriving is one of the most quietly miraculous things I’ve witnessed.
Three different people, three different fights, three different kinds of becoming. And somehow, watching all of it happen while I was too overwhelmed most days to really watch it, I still saw it. I still see it.
Now they’re adults. On their own paths, good ones. Good humans, all three of them not because I did everything right, but maybe because I did enough of it, even when I was falling apart doing it.
Letting go now is not one feeling. It’s relief, real, bone-deep relief, that they made it, that the fighting worked, that nobody took them from me and nothing broke them permanently along the way. But it’s also grief, still, for the years I couldn’t be fully present for because I was too busy surviving them. I don’t get those years back. I don’t get to redo the parts where I was too tired, too sick, too scared to just be their mother without also being a patient and a defendant and a survivor all at once.
I’m learning to hold both of those things without needing one to cancel out the other. The relief doesn’t erase the grief, and the grief doesn’t diminish how proud I am. They can just sit next to each other, the way most true things about a life this hard-won have to.
They’re flying now. I built something strong enough to launch them, even from inside a storm I didn’t choose and couldn’t always survive gracefully. That has to be enough.
Some days, it even feels like more than enough.