The In-Between

There is a space I have learned to live in that doesn’t have a clean name.

It sits somewhere between grief and gratitude. Between the mother I lost and the mother I am becoming. Between missing someone fiercely and showing up fully for the person in front of you. I have lived in that space for years now and I am still learning how to manage it.

My mother was gone before my daughter was born. There was never an overlap. I never stood in the middle of three generations. Never had the experience of being held by the woman who raised me while reaching toward the child I was raising. I went from daughter to motherless, and then sometime after that, I became a mother myself. Those two things never got to exist at the same time.

That is its own kind of grief. Not better or worse than other kinds. Just particular. Just mine.

I went on a walk yesterday morning. A mother-daughter walk. The kind of event built around celebrating what you have, who you have, while you have them. I showed up. I talked. I laughed. There were stretches where I wasn’t thinking about loss at all just moving, just present, just there.

Then I noticed a woman I knew walking between her mother and her daughter. Three generations in a line. And something in me went very still.

I didn’t feel envy. I felt recognition of something I never had and will not have. Of what it might have looked like if the timing had been different. My mother on one side, my daughter on the other, and me held in the middle. It wasn’t a sad moment. It was just a true one.

I think about the things my mother missed often. My high school graduation. The milestones that came after. The birth of my daughter, maybe the biggest one. She never got to see who I became in that delivery room. She never got to hold my girl. There are days that sits quietly in the background and days it sits right in the front of everything.

Friday night I laid out two matching shirts, one for me and one for my daughter. She chose the shirts. I told her I would decorate it. She went to bed trusting that I would. And I sat up in the quiet and pressed rhinestones into the fabric, one by one, until it looked like something she would love.

Saturday morning she came straight downstairs to collect her shirt.

That moment, her going straight for it, the trust in that — that is what the in-between holds that I don’t always have words for. The joy is real. It is not performed. It is not a replacement for grief. It just coexists with it, sometimes in the same quiet night, sometimes in the same morning moment.

I have her sewing machine. I have the wax fabrics we were piecing together when I was around eleven, her hands guiding mine through the work. I have never finished that project. I used to feel something like shame about that. Now I think I just wasn’t ready. Now I think finishing it might be something I do with my daughter beside me. Not a middle, but a continuation. A thread that keeps going even when the hands that started it are gone.

That is what I am learning to hold. Not just the loss. Not just the love. The ongoing, quiet negotiation between the two.

If you are in the in-between, motherless and also a mother, grieving and also present, missing someone while showing up for someone else… I see you in that space. You are allowed to feel all of it without having to choose.

And if you are simply motherless, not in any in-between, just holding the absence on a day that was not designed with you in mind… I see you too. That is its own kind of carrying and it deserves its own kind of room.

However you moved through today, I hope you found at least one moment that felt like yours.

Mine was Friday night. Rhinestones in the quiet. My girl’s shirt finished and waiting by morning.

That was enough. That was everything.

Creatively yours,

Naana 💜