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There is some grief that has no funeral.
There are deaths that leave the body alive.
This poem is about estrangement from an adult child—something almost no mother ever talks about publicly because the shame is so nuclear, so weaponized, so misunderstood, so instantly blamed on the mother by default.
I am sharing this not for advice, not for debate, not for diagnosis, not for reconciliation campaigns, and not for pity. I’m sharing because it is real and a huge part of my healing is doing it out loud, because I suffered in silence for way too many years.
Because too many mothers are silently dying of this.
Because even in my public-facing work—midwives, birth, business, leadership, transformation—there is a hidden room in my heart that has been walled off for years. And when I share all the bright, fierce, wild becoming parts of my life…this part of me also deserves air, witness, and truth.
This is not a poem about giving up on a child.
This is a poem about refusing to give up on myself.
About learning that mothering doesn’t end when a child steps away from you—it just turns inward to the parts of yourself that were never held, never soothed, never protected. Sometimes the bravest form of love is choosing to stay alive inside your own life, even when someone you loved tries to erase you from theirs.
So this is me telling the truth and offering my hand to any mother reading this who has swallowed this same unspeakable sorrow: you are not alone. And I promise the love you are grieving can be a healing balm if you learn to apply it to yourself in your child’s absence.
This is my grief—transmuted into words. And this is my vow to remain.
I’m still here
I carried you under my ribs,
stitched you into the music of my blood,
nursed you at the altar of my own body,
and still,
still,
I lost you.
Not to death,
but to something colder.
A silence sharper than any grave.
A living ghost
who wears your face but wields it like a knife.
You bait me with broken glass,
And call me gross for bleeding,
dangle love like a prize I must earn by amputating my own dignity.
And oh, God—
some part of me
still wants to reach out,
still wants to work for your love.
Still wants to believe
there’s a door back to the baby
who once fell asleep on my chest;
to the girl I taught to ride horses;
to the young mother in labor that hot June night.
But there is no door.
There is no map to the past.
Only the endless horizon of a road
I never wanted to walk:
a road where I mother myself now,
where I light candles for the living dead,
where I bury memories like seeds
I may never see bloom.
I grieve what you were.
I grieve what you became.
I grieve what will never be.
Birthdays and bedtime stories,
your daughters calling me maugie,
your voice softening into something that sounds like love again.
I scream into the ocean inside me,
and it answers with the terrible holiness of survival:
You are still here.
You are still here.
You are still here.
I walk on,
arms empty,
heart ragged, and broken
faith knitted together with trembling fingers.
Now I mother the parts of me left behind.
I hold the ache like a newborn,
rock it through the long nights.
I refuse to die of wounds I did not deserve.
I live,
even when it breaks me.
I live,
because my love is not just a contract I made with my children.
It is a vow I now make to myself:
To stay.
To stay.
To stay.
Because even if you profess to never need me again,
these tiny parts of me, need me.
This mewling infant-self-worth will grow strong.
My love will guard the small, bright ember of me
like it once guarded you.
I will not beg for light from your darkness.
I will not trade truth for tradition.
I will rise from my own ash, not to prove I survived,
but to remember that I was once a good mother.
I was once your mother.
~ Written by: Augustine Colebrook, MA
author: Augustine Colebrook
Image: Author's Own
Editor: Molly Murphy
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