But with one cruel difference: no one allows us to stop and grieve
The person who stood beside me for more than half my life disappeared in the way he existed to me. And that is hard to explain to people looking from the outside, seeing only “a couple who broke up.” He was not just a boyfriend. Not just the father of my children. He was my best friend for more than fifteen years. The person I called first. The person I shared everything with. The silences. The routines. The silly jokes. The fears. The plans. An entire life.
And suddenly… he stopped existing in that way.
Sometimes it feels like someone died. But worse than that, it feels like someone died and I was never given permission to stop.
Because there are children to dress in the morning. Breakfasts to make. School bags. Baths. Bedtime stories. Laundry. Dinners. Playtime. Fevers. Tantrums. Hugs. There is always something urgent when you have small children. And in the middle of all that, people still expect you to keep functioning normally.
But how do you grieve while making soup and singing children’s songs?
How do you cry over an entire life you lost while one child is pulling at your shirt because he wants to breastfeed and the other needs help building a Lego dinosaur?
There is no space to fall apart.
And maybe that is what scares me most about this phase of life. I never even had time to fully understand what I was feeling. There was no silence. No distance. No disappearing from the world, the way heartbreak so often demands. Because while my heart was breaking, I still had to be a mother. And mothers cannot simply disappear for a week to cry in the dark.
Sometimes I even feel guilty for being sad. Because there are urgent decisions to make. Huge decisions. The kind that shape my children’s future. Where we will live. How we will live. How custody will work. And I look at all of this and think: how is anyone supposed to make the biggest decisions of their life at the exact moment they feel the most lost?
People ask me for clarity when I am still in shock. They ask me to be rational on days when all I want is to curl up in bed and cry for the person I lost. The family I lost. The life I thought I was going to have.
But I can’t. Because at seven in the morning, someone wakes up and calls: “Mummy?”
And I get up. Even heartbroken. Even exhausted. Even without knowing how to keep going.
There are days when I feel like I am surviving two different kinds of grief at once: the loss of the man I loved… and the fear of losing half of my children’s lives too.
And maybe that is what almost no one understands about separation with young children: there is no time to grieve slowly. Your heart breaks… but the routine keeps going.
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