The Identity Crisis After Losing a Child

I used to know exactly who I was.

I was a mom. I was good at it. I woke up without an alarm, already halfway out of bed because someone needed breakfast or a matching sock or help finding a crayon that was absolutely not the same shade of blue as the other one. My days had purpose before my feet hit the floor. Now I lie there and negotiate with my eyelids. Opening them feels like a chore. Putting on pants feels optional at best. Some days it feels heroic. I wish that were a joke. It kind of is. It kind of isn’t. My daughter was six. Six years of sticky fingers and loud laughter and tiny arms that fit perfectly around my neck. Six years of schedules that were chaotic in the best way. Arts and crafts. Playdates. Ice cream runs that felt like the most important appointment of the day. I didn’t know that talking about ice cream would be the last thing she ever said to me. I didn’t know that a normal moment could harden into something permanent.

That’s the thing that keeps breaking me. How ordinary it was. How life didn’t warn me.

I miss being needed. I miss being someone’s whole world. I miss the way joy used to show up without effort. Now joy feels like a foreign language I once spoke fluently and have completely forgotten. I watch other people live in it, and I don’t understand how they’re still allowed to. I don’t know who I am anymore. The role that defined me vanished, and no one tells you what happens when the thing you were best at is taken away. People say things. You’re here for a reason. She’d want you to be happy. Everything happens for a reason. Then they hand me another pill and tell me to be patient with myself. Thirteen pills. I take them like I’m supposed to. I do what a good girl does.

Inside, I am unbearably sad. Not the quiet kind. The heavy, pressing kind that sits on my chest and makes breathing feel like work. I don’t understand the world anymore. I don’t understand what I’m meant to do in it. I live in a reality where the only thing I want is my child, and it is the one thing that will never be given back to me. No justice makes sense of this. No explanation that feels equal to the value of her life. My time feels frozen while the rest of the world rushes past in a blur of color and noise. People are moving forward. I am standing still, holding something invisible that weighs more than anything I’ve ever carried.

I smile when I’m expected to. I show up. I swallow my pills, and all the while, I think about how this does not feel like living. It feels like surviving something that never ends.

I was a mom. I was good at it, and I don’t know who I am now that the person who made me that is gone.

-Nicole Louthain, The Mama Who Vanished