Author: Felecia J

It was time for the family to go back for the viewing, but we were waiting on someone else. The funeral home asked if anyone wanted to go back alone.

I said I would.

I wasn’t prepared for what happened when I saw you in that coffin, Mom.

It felt like the nightmare you hope you’ll wake up from before it actually happens.

I knew you were dead.

I knew it.

But some part of me still believed that if I could just say the right thing, loudly enough, desperately enough, you might open your eyes.

I think I thought that even if you didn’t open your eyes, something in me could shift and I could find closure.

But each time I said it all, nothing changed in me, so then I would scream it all again.

And nothing was changing in front me or inside of me.

You looked like you.

You weren’t deformed. You didn’t look terribly sick. You hardly looked dead.

I looked at you and thought:

How could I have known?

And then I lost it.

“Mom, I love you.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I want my mom.”

“Everything is my fault.”

“Mom, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.”

I screamed it louder.

And louder.

As though volume might somehow reach wherever you had gone.

The last thing I said to you while you were alive was that I loved you. I’m grateful for that.

But standing there looking at you, I wished I had said it in person.

I wished I had hugged you.

I wished I had kissed your cheek.

I wished for one more chance to make everything between us small enough that love could swallow it whole.

Mom, I am dying inside.

You didn’t wake up.

I tried so hard.

Eventually I stopped looking at the coffin and started looking at you.

The little freckles on your hands.

The bump on your nose.

Your fingers.

They looked exactly the same.

There was something strangely comforting about being close to you. I had spent days dreading that room, and suddenly I didn’t want to leave it.

Mom, there is a hole where you were.

When crying and screaming didn’t work, I got angry.

I wanted to punch the wall.

I wanted to throw something.

I’m getting angry again writing this.

I know you didn’t choose to leave me, Mom.

Of course I know that.

But my broken heart doesn’t care what my brain knows.

I was furious that you left me.

I was furious because you knew how much I loved you.

I spent so much of my life wanting to be a good daughter and wanting you to be proud of me.

And I needed you.

Sometimes I don’t think you understood what I needed because you spent so much of your own life surviving.

You grew up worrying about things I never had to worry about.

But I was fed, Mom.

You made sure of that.

You gave me a different life.

And because you did, my needs became different from yours.

Sometimes what I needed couldn’t be bought.

It couldn’t be fixed.

It couldn’t be put in a box or handed to me.

And sometimes we completely missed each other there.

But there were other times when somehow you knew exactly what I needed.

There were days when I called you because I was emotionally on the brink.

There were days when I was haunted and couldn’t get off the floor of my office because my body felt too heavy for my heart to carry.

And somehow, Mom, you could put your hand right through that phone and hold me.

You carried me.

That’s part of why I’m so angry now.

Because I still need you.

And you’re gone.

I feel like I’m screaming inside a heart stuck somewhere between what was and what can never be again.

I know I will never be exactly the same.

And then, while I was standing there screaming at you, I realized something.

It was the first time in my entire life I had ever spoken to you and you didn’t respond.

So I screamed until I couldn’t scream anymore.

And then I stayed.

I had thought I would want to run from your funeral.

That’s what I do with pain sometimes. I retreat. I don’t particularly like being held. I don’t like being watched while I hurt. Give me a room by myself and let me figure out how to breathe again.

But I couldn’t stay away from you.

After I wore myself out, I stayed close.

I looked at your freckles on your hands.

Your face.

The way your nose had that bump I wish mine had.

All those tiny features that belonged to my mother.

And eventually I thought:

You’re not hurting anymore, Mom.

You carried wounds long before I ever existed. Some of them followed you through your entire life.

Some reached me, too.

There were things between us that I desperately wish had been different. There were things I needed from you that you couldn’t always understand. There were things you needed from me that I couldn’t always give without losing pieces of myself.

We hurt each other.

We loved each other.

Both things are true.

And death doesn’t sanitize the past.

And the past doesn’t have to be rewritten for me to miss you.

I don’t need to erase the hard parts to know that I would move heaven and earth today to have you back.

At your funeral, people talked about how much you helped people.

How compassionate you were.

How you could see someone hurting and immediately want to do something about it.

They were right.

That was you.

But compassion was complicated in our family.

Sometimes you could understand the wounds inside people who had caused wounds of their own. Sometimes I needed you to understand mine, but I couldn’t ever tell you outright.

I don’t think we ever completely figured that out.

Maybe we would have.

I thought we had time.

Goodness, Mom.

I thought we had time.

And there are things I wish I could tell you now.

I understand more about you than I did when I was younger.

I understand that you were mothering me with tools you had forged while surviving your own childhood.

I understand that some of the things you gave me were things nobody had given you.

And I understand that some of the things I needed were things nobody had ever taught you how to give.

None of that makes every hurt disappear.

But it makes me look at you differently.

And now there is Abigail.

Your granddaughter.

There are things that hurt you.

There are things that hurt me.

But they don’t get her.

That’s where this story changes.

She doesn’t have to inherit every wound simply because it came before her.

And, Mom, I wish you had understood that sometimes when I created distance, I wasn’t trying to stop loving you.

I was trying to stop pain from traveling another generation.

I couldn’t save the little girl you were.

I couldn’t save the little girl I was.

But I can protect mine.

And I’m going to give her the good parts of you.

There were so many.

Your generosity.

Your toughness.

Your ridiculous determination.

Your humor.

Your ability to make a catastrophe somehow seem manageable.

Your willingness to show up.

Your fierce love.

The way you could make me believe everything might actually be okay when I called you from the floor.

The way you came from so little and made sure your children had more.

Those things get to keep going.

Maybe that’s how families heal.

Not because one generation suddenly gets everything right.

Maybe one mother changes what she knows how to change.

Then her daughter changes a little more.

And someday my daughter will probably recognize things in me that I couldn’t see myself.

Maybe she’ll change those too.

One daughter at a time.

I may spend the rest of my life walking across some of the broken glass left behind.

But I’ll put my daughter on my shoulders.

She doesn’t have to walk through it just because we did.

And you don’t have to walk through any of it anymore either, Mom.

You’re free.

Nothing that haunted you can reach you now.

And that space between us that felt so enormous at the end?

It’s gone.

None of it matters to me standing beside your coffin.

I would move heaven and earth to hug you.

I’d kiss you on the cheek.

I’d tell you I’m sorry.

I’d ask you to forgive me.

I’d tell you I forgive you.

And then I’d probably hold onto you until you complained that I was squeezing too hard.

But I can’t.

And maybe that was what all that screaming was about.

For the first time in our relationship, there was nothing left I could say that could change what happened next.

You didn’t answer.

You couldn’t.

So eventually I stopped trying to find the words that would bring you back.

And I said the only ones that were left.

I love you, Mom.

I love you.

I love you.

And, I want you back.

People ask me all the time what my relationship with Kaleb’s biological mom was like.

I usually just tell them the truth: it was really good.

A couple of weeks ago, the kids were talking about how they came out of my belly, and Kaleb started asking questions. It wasn’t some deep or sad moment. He was just curious.

He asked who his mom was, so I told him her name.

Then he asked why he didn’t stay with her.

I told him, “She was really sick, and she wasn’t completely sure she could take care of you. So I asked her if I could have you, and she let me.”

And that was pretty much it.

Then this week I found this letter.

I wrote it to his mom on October 31, 2019. He had only been living with us for a few months. In foster care, once a child has been in care for 15 of the previous 22 months, the state is generally required to file for termination of parental rights. So at that point, we were nowhere near knowing how his story would end.

Back then, his name was still Kane. I loved him already, but I had absolutely no idea that I would eventually adopt him or that one day he would become Kaleb.

At the time, his mom had made the decision to go into inpatient drug treatment.

And apparently I wrote her this.

Reading it seven years later, one part made me question myself:

“As long as I am around Kane will always know you as the mom who walked in the cold and rain to be with him, not the mom who is in a hard place.”

And another:

“I will show him your picture in his baby book and tell him ‘mama.’”

Have I kept this promise?

It reminded me of a conversation we had in the car that seemed ordinary at the time.

Just me telling my son the truth: yes, he was loved. He didn’t become mine because nobody else loved him.

Here we were seven years later, he asked.

And I got to keep that promise.

I think this letter also answers the question people have asked me all these years about how I could have such a good relationship with his mom.

Kaleb has always represented a whole person to me.

Not just my child.

He had a name before the one I gave him. He had a mother before me. He had a history that started before he ever entered my house.

And loving him meant loving all of him.

Supporting his mom was never separate from loving Kane. It was one of the ways I loved him completely.

When I wrote this letter, I loved that little boy desperately. And I desperately wanted his mom to get healthy.

Those things weren’t opposites, even though her getting healthy could have meant that he left me.

That may be one of the hardest things foster care ever taught me:

Sometimes loving someone completely means loving them enough to want what is best for them, even when where they may end up doesn’t line up with what you want.

That Halloween, I wrote that I would probably load “your baby and my baby” into the car together.

And here they are.

My baby and her baby.

I just didn’t know yet that one day they would both be mine.

I don’t know what foster mom might need to hear this today, or what biological mom might need the encouragement.

But a hard chapter does not have to become someone’s entire story.

And loving a child well sometimes looks like refusing to let it become their mother’s entire story either.

December 6, 2012.

I arrived at the hospital in the late hours of the night to induce the delivery of my son.

A pot of gold waiting at the end of a colorless rainbow.

A baby who never got the chance to be born, followed by a pregnancy complicated by a subchorionic hematoma that gave this baby only a 50% chance of survival, leaves a woman clenching her fists as tightly as she can to hope—all while preparing for the fall.

Prayers for God’s mercy on a fallible woman became regular conversations in our house.

Once, in the shower, with a large pregnant belly and an overwhelming feeling of helplessness, I leaned on the only One I believed had the power to change an outcome I could not control.

On my knees, water dripping down my naked body, I begged God to make Matthew mine.

It was a request I didn’t feel completely worthy of asking.

I had a Doppler at home to listen to Matthew’s heartbeat. Most mornings, I checked.

Hearing that little gallop gave me something pregnancy otherwise couldn’t: proof. For that moment, my baby was alive. He was still there. We were still moving toward the finish line.

I thought I needed to get him born.

If I could just get him here safely, maybe I could finally exhale.

I didn’t know yet that the fear would come with me.

Before pregnancy, I was happy, outgoing, and enthusiastic about life. Depression was not something I knew intimately. In fact, I remember someone I knew struggling with depression and making a comment that they needed to do something about it.

Get help.

Make a change.

Do something.

I didn’t mean to be cruel. I simply didn’t understand yet that sometimes a person can desperately want to get better, do the things she’s supposed to do, and still wake up sick the next morning.

I was about to learn that the hard way.

But here we were.

Our pot of gold.

The hospital hung Christmas lights every December, and I had told Robert that if I ever had a baby there, I hoped those Christmas lights would somehow make the cut into the final scene.

They did.

It was a long labor, but I remember the miracle of seeing a real-life baby in front of me.

He cried.

The world around us seemed to light up like a spotlight had suddenly been turned on in the room.

I took my baby and smiled.

Then he closed his eyes.

And I lost my breath.

“He’s dying. Please help him. Take him.”

I screamed for someone to help him.

It shocked everyone.

Including me.

Matthew wasn’t dying.

He had simply fallen asleep in his mother’s arms.

For months, I thought I just needed to get him here safely. But when he finally arrived, something inside me didn’t receive the message that the emergency was over.

I had my baby. I still needed proof that he was okay.

We had no idea this would be the beginning of a season of sorrow.

⸻

We made our way home, and I rocked Matthew in his glider and nursed him on demand.

He wasn’t nursing well, and his weight became something we legitimately needed to watch. I took him to the hospital every Friday to be weighed and kept track of that little piece of paper like it was a certificate of survival.

Eventually, my anxiety won, and I supplemented more and more.

That wasn’t my plan.

But I could not tolerate feeding my baby without being able to see and measure how much milk he had actually gotten.

A few days after delivery, I was struggling even to get up and grab Matthew because of tearing and stitches. I wasn’t getting much sleep. I wasn’t drinking enough. I wasn’t eating enough.

I remember my skin even feeling different.

Once I healed from the physical pain, I realized I was living in a pool of grief.

This was not what I pictured.

This was not what Facebook made motherhood look like.

People smiled in pictures. They doted on their babies. They put a sticker on their baby’s onesie every month and photographed the milestone.

I had the monthly sticker.

I had the camera.

And I stood behind it feeling like a fraud.

⸻

It was a slow fade.

At first, I worried about breastfeeding and Matthew gaining weight.

But underneath those ordinary concerns, something much larger was taking shape.

I loved him more than anything, but he represented something I had not quite been able to wrap my head around:

Someone needed me now.

My life was no longer entirely my own.

And I had a problem with that—not because of Matthew, but because I didn’t feel like I had lived my life in a way that could guarantee Matthew would always have me.

My mom almost died from stage 3 breast cancer when she was 28.

I was nine.

She tried to go to a doctor, and they turned her away because they thought she was too young. She was postpartum, too, and she was initially told the lump was a swollen milk duct.

A year later, it was still there.

It was cancer.

My mom cried.

My mom thought she was going to die.

I thought she was going to die.

Before Matthew, those memories belonged to my childhood.

After Matthew, I could suddenly see them from my mother’s side.

And worse, I could see them from his.

⸻

Before motherhood, I jumped out of airplanes for fun.

People told me I should get mammograms because of my family history.

I didn’t go.

In fact, I went to tanning salons instead.

I was quivering as all of this began unraveling in my mind.

I loved my son more than life, but suddenly every careless thing I had ever done with my own life felt like something that might cut our time together short.

The tanning beds.

The screenings I skipped.

Every stupid risk that once belonged to a young woman who assumed she had plenty of tomorrows.

Now somebody needed those tomorrows from me.

And I couldn’t promise them to him.

I couldn’t bear the thought.

But the thought kept finding me in my dehydrated, sleep-deprived slumber.

The glider where I had started out rocking Matthew became a place in the house I feared, simply because I knew my thoughts became louder there.

My inner reprimand screamed at me from the corner of that room.

Eventually, I stopped going in there.

The more I thought about all the normal young-adult choices I’d made—choices that no longer felt normal in this state of mind—the more I thought about life and death.

And then another realization hit me:

I had brought Matthew into this world, and someday he was going to die.

We all are.

I had always known that.

But suddenly I couldn’t understand how everyone else was okay with it.

I felt selfish.

I loved him desperately, but part of me wished I hadn’t exposed him to a world where suffering and death were inevitable.

I hated myself for doing this to both of us.

I even resented my own parents for having me.

I never wanted to hurt Matthew.

I never had thoughts of hurting him.

Quite the opposite.

My mind was consumed with preventing anything from ever hurting him.

That was part of the prison. I had assigned myself the impossible responsibility of protecting another human being from everything—including the parts of being human that no mother can prevent.

My thoughts became a prison.

And I was suffering.

⸻

Motherhood came with responsibilities I understood.

Feed him.

Bathe him.

Change him.

Take him to the doctor.

Keep him warm.

Love him.

But somewhere in my postpartum mind, other responsibilities quietly appeared on the list:

Keep Matthew alive.

Keep yourself alive so you can raise him.

Never let anything separate you.

Those were the responsibilities I could never finish.

There was no box I could check that said:

Matthew will always be safe. ✓

There was no test I could take that promised:

You will live long enough to raise your son. ✓

But my brain treated those impossible guarantees like ordinary maternal responsibilities.

And every day, I felt like I was failing to complete them.

The only way I knew how to emotionally survive was to try to get ahead of everything that could possibly go wrong.

Keep harm out of Matthew’s way.

Find anything that could be wrong with me before it was too late.

Prepare for the worst before the worst could surprise me.

But that was a much bigger job than it sounds like on paper.

What if my mother’s cancer was coming for me?

Was the buzzer about to go off on my own life?

How do I prevent Matthew and me from separating?

What if I’m already too late?

Will I go to heaven?

Is there a heaven?

Is there a God?

Of course there is a God.

But what if there isn’t?

Then dying becomes much worse.

Then I don’t leave my son for a better place.

I just leave him.

There was an ambiguous sense of impending doom, but I didn’t understand yet that the catastrophe was happening inside my mind, not in the world around me.

I couldn’t understand how other people could be happy.

How could they be so calm knowing what they had exposed their children to simply by bringing them into the world?

And if I admitted that I was having these thoughts, how would everyone look at me?

Am I broken?

⸻

Christmas came only a few weeks after Matthew did.

I remember sitting with extended family while everyone opened presents.

At some point, I started crying.

People noticed.

They teased me a little for being emotional, and I gave them the explanation that made sense.

“It’s just so sweet.”

And it was sweet.

That wasn’t a lie.

But it wasn’t why I was crying.

I thought it might be my last Christmas.

I was sitting in a room full of people who loved me, holding the baby I had begged God to give me, surrounded by Christmas presents and family and all the evidence of a life I desperately wanted.

And inside my mind, I was already grieving leaving it.

Nobody in that room knew.

I had given them an explanation they could understand.

⸻

I could barely bring myself to talk to Robert about any of it.

At one point, Robert needed to travel out of state for a week, and I knew I wasn’t comfortable being alone with Matthew for that long.

So we made a plan.

Every single day Robert was gone, someone from our family came to stay with me and Matthew. For that entire week, we made sure I wasn’t left alone trying to carry everything by myself.

We were taking precautions.

We knew I was struggling.

People were helping.

And I was still sick.

Having someone there didn’t silence my thoughts. It didn’t suddenly make me feel like myself again. But it made those days more manageable.

Even on ordinary days, I barely made it to 5:00.

When Robert came home, I felt relief.

But the next morning, the thoughts were waiting for me again.

How do I control them?

Why won’t they leave?

I was supposed to love this season of my life.

Everyone online seemed happy.

I wasn’t happy.

I was sad.

And I was living in an almost constant state of terror.

I couldn’t get help by staying silent.

But I couldn’t tolerate the thought of the look I might get if I admitted everything out loud, either.

Then I did admit some of it.

And afterward, I didn’t always want to do it again.

Because how many times can you tell the person you love that you’re still not okay?

How many times can someone ask whether you’re feeling better before you desperately want the answer to finally be yes?

Sometimes I wanted everyone to believe I was getting better.

Sometimes I wanted to believe it myself.

I was tired of being the sick person.

I was afraid that if I kept talking, people would eventually realize just how consuming this had become.

They would think I was crazy.

There was something wrong with me.

It was dark.

I was never okay.

How long can I live in this darkness?

Will I ever see the light again?

Will I ever genuinely laugh again?

How long can my heart race and break?

How long can I live in constant emotional agony?

How long can it feel like a thousand miles just to walk into the kitchen and make breakfast?

I became afraid of waking up because I knew the pain would still be there waiting for me.

And yet I was terrified of dying because that meant leaving my son motherless.

I desperately wanted to live.

I just desperately needed this to stop.

There were moments I wished I had never been born.

Not because I had a plan to end my life.

I didn’t.

I didn’t imagine how I would do it.

I didn’t want to leave Matthew.

That was the very thing I was terrified of.

I wanted an end to the unbearable feeling of being alive like this.

I was stuck.

⸻

And perhaps the strangest part was that I didn’t know this was postpartum depression.

I thought I knew what postpartum depression looked like.

In my mind, postpartum depression meant a mother didn’t want her baby. Maybe she couldn’t bond with him. Maybe she regretted becoming a mother. Maybe she wanted to hurt herself or her child.

That wasn’t me.

I wanted Matthew.

I had begged God for Matthew.

I loved holding him. I wanted to nurse him. I wanted to take care of him.

I had never thought about hurting him.

I didn’t want less motherhood. I was terrified of losing it.

So I didn’t understand what was happening to me as depression.

It felt like fear.

It felt like danger.

It felt like something terrible was coming and everyone else was inexplicably calm about it.

It felt like an enormous responsibility I couldn’t figure out how to complete.

I didn’t understand that postpartum illness could look like this, too.

I only knew that something had happened to the woman I used to be.

And I wasn’t okay.

⸻

Five weeks postpartum, on a Friday night, I went to the hospital to have Matthew weighed.

I saw my OB in the elevator.

With tears threatening to stream down my face, I said, “I think I’m going to have to call you Monday.”

He looked puzzled.

“Is everything okay?”

And for the first time, I found words for it.

“I’m not okay. I think I’m depressed.”

He was stunned.

I don’t think he understood yet what kind of depression I meant.

“You wanted this baby so bad.”

“I know,” I told him. “But I feel like I can’t keep him safe. I’m having thoughts about whether God is real. And then I feel hopeless.”

The strange thing was, he was right.

I had wanted this baby so bad.

I had begged God for him from the floor of my shower.

I had spent months terrified that I would lose him.

I had listened for his heartbeat.

I had prayed over the bleeding.

I had waited for him.

I had wanted him more than anything.

And none of that protected me from postpartum depression.

In some ways, how desperately I loved him became tangled up in it.

⸻

I did what I knew to do.

I told my doctor.

I started medication.

I attended Bible study.

I prayed.

I accepted help.

My family showed up.

And I was still sick.

There wasn’t one morning when the medicine suddenly worked or one Bible verse that snapped me back into myself.

Sometimes Bible study comforted me. Sometimes questions about God and eternity frightened me even more.

But I kept going.

Getting help did not mean I immediately got better.

That battle went on for about a year.

And that taught me something I wish I had understood before I ever made that careless comment about someone else’s depression:

Wanting to get better and knowing how to get better are not the same thing.

Neither is getting help and immediately being well.

I had done something about it.

I was still doing something about it.

And for a while, I was still sick.

⸻

I became someone I didn’t recognize.

A fun-loving, social, enthusiastic woman quietly became afraid to say too much—to accidentally reveal to the outside world what was happening inside her.

Somewhere inside me, I knew other people weren’t seeing what I was seeing.

But knowing that didn’t make it feel less real.

The cancer diagnosis hadn’t happened.

The funeral hadn’t happened.

My son had not lost his mother.

The catastrophe existed in my mind.

But the terror existed in my body.

And from inside that terror, possibility could feel almost indistinguishable from reality.

I had spent the beginning of Matthew’s life asking God for something impossible:

Let me know we’re going to be okay.

Eventually, my prayers became smaller.

I asked God for five years.

Just five years to be his mother.

Five years to take care of him.

Five years to get him a little bigger.

Five years before I had to leave him.

That was all the frightened woman I had become could bring herself to ask for.

Matthew was born December 7, 2012.

It has been almost fourteen years.

⸻

Author’s Note

This is not what postpartum depression looks like for every woman.

This is what it looked like for me.

It happened many years ago. I have been off antidepressant medication for several years, and I am doing well today.

I share that not because medication is the right answer for every person, or because my recovery followed a straight line.

It didn’t.

But during that season, honesty and medical treatment were invaluable to me.

I told my doctor.

I took medication.

I prayed.

I went to Bible study.

I accepted help.

My family showed up.

And sometimes I still woke up sick the next morning.

Recovery was gradual.

There is something else that stayed with me.

Robert will tell you that if I hear someone has had a baby, chances are I’m going to make them dinner.

Sometimes I know the mother.

Sometimes I don’t know her at all.

There are women who have eaten meals I’ve cooked who probably couldn’t pick me out of a crowd. Maybe Robert works with their husband. Maybe I simply heard that somebody brought a baby home.

I don’t need to know whether she’s struggling.

That’s sort of the point.

I remember what it was like when people asked how I was doing and I didn’t know how to answer.

I remember wanting desperately to feel better.

I remember being exhausted by my own thoughts.

And I remember that sometimes another question—even one asked with tremendous love—felt like one more thing I had to answer.

So I don’t usually knock on the door unless they want company.

I leave dinner by the door.

No diagnosis.

No expectation that she tell me how she’s doing.

No requirement that she be struggling enough to deserve help.

Just dinner.

Because I can’t tell by looking at a new mother which one is having the greatest experience of her life and which one is quietly trying to make it until 5:00.

Sometimes showing up for someone means showing up with help instead of another question.

If you are somewhere inside your own version of this darkness, I hope you will tell someone the truth.

And if you’ve already told someone and you’re still not better, tell them again.

I once thought getting help meant getting better.

Now I know sometimes getting help simply means having people help carry you while you get better.

Not better yet did not mean never better.