By Sarah McPherson 
I watch my daughter’s face crumble. Not just from the pain, but from the weight of it all, the fear, the frustration, the heartbreak that once again her body has betrayed her.
I pull her close for a hug, whispering words I hope bring comfort, but inside I feel it too, that familiar pain rising in my chest. The helplessness. The sorrow.
The grief I cannot quite bear to name.
Because how do you reconcile this pain you feel, with the overwhelming love you feel for the life you have built?
How do you hold both joy and sorrow in the same breath? Gratitude and grief?
Because I do love my life.
I look around and smile. The house is filled with love, four beautiful children, and a husband I adore. This is the life that I dreamed of.
And in the very same breath, I feel a heaviness I cannot describe.
Alongside joy, there is also overwhelming fatigue—but worse still, there is fear, and a very silent grief. It is an ache that settles into the corners of me that I dare not show the world.
I am a mother, a wife, a twin, but I am also a carer, my children’s advocate. And there is an overwhelming grief that comes with that.
I love my life. But some days, I hate the utter exhaustion that comes with it.
There is a quiet grief no one dares talk about. The kind that sneaks in between milestones and meltdowns. The kind that does not erase joy or gratitude but quietly sits beside it.
I ask myself regularly, What do I grieve?
Not my family, they’re here, laughing around the dinner table.
No, I grieve for my daughter, for the teenage years we all imagined, now filled with emergency rooms, ambulance rides, medication, stilted plans, and endless therapy appointments.
I grieve for my son, who struggles to fit into a world that doesn’t understand the way his brain works, and for the children who bully him for it.
I grieve for their siblings, whose bodies jump at every sound, always on alert. Who must be advocates for their own siblings, while navigating their own teenage years.
I grieve the simple freedom of leaving the house without every phone call making my heart race, jumping at every noise, and without the constant hypervigilance that shadows my every move.
You see, grief lives here, not because I regret my life, not because I hate my life—no! But because I love it so fiercely that watching the people I love suffer is unbearable.
I grieve watching them carry burdens parents and children should not have to carry. Watching siblings navigate emotions far too big for their little shoulders, far too big for mine. Watching dreams shift and change under the weight of each diagnosis, doctor’s visit, and hospital stay.
And yet, I have realized I don’t need to choose.
I don’t need to choose between gratitude and grief.
I can carry both. I must.
And maybe, just maybe, you do too.
Perhaps this is what no one tells you about motherhood. You don’t have to choose between gratitude and grief. You must learn to live with both.
by Mikaela Perron-Sampson 
by Tiffany Nardoni 
