Going through the grief process is tough enough. When you have to be a parent at the same time it can make for a really rocky road.
For a long time, I thought it was only acceptable to grieve if someone died. In recent years, I have learned that it’s perfectly acceptable and even normal to grieve various losses in life. The grief process looks the same.
Lately, I have had to navigate the grief process through a sudden employment change and the loss of my work partner and best friend of nearly a decade.
The morning he was let go it didn’t seem real. I was sure the company would change their mind. I remember driving home and feeling like the whole world was buzzing around me and I had just been dealt a significant blow. I wanted to crawl under the covers and erase what had just happened. My parenting and even work responsibilities didn’t allow me to do that. Everywhere I went that day I wondered if anyone noticed I was in trauma mode. Most importantly, when I picked up my kids I felt like I had to perform. I had to be okay, even though all of the fire alarms were going off.
It wasn’t long before a great sadness and anger set in. I was mad at my partner for his actions. I was upset with my company for their response. I was disappointed in myself for possibly not doing the right things. I just wanted to turn back the clocks of time and make the outcome different.
My thoughts were consumed by the loss and I still had to make dinner, and try to be present with my kids. Simple tasks seemed much harder than they had before. For about a month after the loss, I was flat out not a good Mom. I talked to my kids about how I was feeling to some degree. I told them I was sad, but they didn’t completely understand because their world looked much the same. At the end of the day, I knew I had to at least physically show up for them and bit by bit I tried to work on the mental part.
In the midst of grief, I don’t know if we can ask much more of ourselves. Having the responsibility of kids forces us out of bed in the morning, obligates us to make meals, and do the pick-up and drop off routine. Younger children require even more effort and they will have less understanding of your sadness. I think it’s okay to go into survival mode for a while. Make sure your kids are physically taken care of as you first start to go through the grief process. I think that’s about all you can do.
In my most recent experience with grief, I bounced back and forth between bargaining and depression for weeks. I’m a “fixer” and I was sure that if I had sincere conversations with the right people I could mend the situation. Every time my bargaining failed, I found myself spiraling into depression. I was so uncomfortable with this new world. My heart broke for my best friend who was painfully struggling financially and mentally. I had a very hard time accepting that I couldn’t control any of it.
It was during this time that there were moments I realized I needed help caring for my kids. I reached out to my ex-husband for extra help. I had to have conversations with my kids and lower their expectations of me for a while. Life started to look more normal bit by bit, but I still needed help. Don’t be ashamed to ask for it. You don’t need to parent through grief alone.
During the past couple of weeks, I have come to the acceptance stage of the grief process. I can’t change the outcome of what happened. I can’t help my friend in the way I wish I could. He has to help himself and I have kids that need their Mom back.
When parenting through grief I think you can handle it through these 4 steps.
- Survive. Get out of bed, feed your kids, get them where they need to be.
- Ask for help. I don’t care if your grief is obvious and understandable or seemingly more minor like mine. You have the right to grieve a loss that was important to you and we need to lose the shame in asking for help.
- Allow yourself to grieve in the hours you don’t have kid responsibilities, when they are in school, at daycare, or asleep. Try to pull yourself together when they are in your presence.
- Let your kids see you sad. You don’t need to be a train wreck in front of young children, but having them see you cry a few tears and talking about loss and emotion is perfectly fine and will help them understand their own emotions someday.
Children can be one of the greatest blessings and one of the toughest roadblocks as you stumble through grief. Allow yourself to be a subpar version of yourself in the beginning, but eventually, let the kids help you find joy and yourself again.
