I heard her before I saw her.

Eevee, in the living room, completely serious, singing ee-ay-ee-ay-yow to the TV while Old MacDonald Had a Farm played. Two years old and she doesn't have the complete words yet but she has the confidence I know she got from my Mama. I stopped what I was doing and just stood there and listened.

And then Emman rolled over for the first time, right there on the floor, using those thick little thunder thighs like he was already trying to walk.

And before I could stop it, the thought was there.

If only you were here, Mama.

That's the grief nobody warned me about. Not just the funerals and the anniversaries. It's this. Standing in your living room watching your children do something ordinary and beautiful, feeling joy and loss in the same breath, because the person who would have celebrated the loudest is the person you can no longer call.

There's a moment I wrote about this week that was the hardest to put into words.

When Mama passed, Peter and I had to go to the mall in Manila to buy her clothes for her funeral. Eevee was on my hip. The saleslady asked if it was for me and for what occasion. I couldn't say it. I just stood there in the middle of that store holding a Filipiniana and I could not make my mouth form the words. So I said: It's for my mom. She's going to a celebration.

I still believe that. Going to heaven to meet our Creator is indeed a celebration.

But I've been thinking about it a lot lately.

She dressed me for my first day. I dressed her for her last on this earth.

Maybe you have your own version of that moment. The task that looked ordinary and then wasn't. The before and after that now lives inside the most unremarkable things. If you do, I want you to know it counts. Every single one of those moments counts. And you are allowed to still be undone by them no matter how long it's been.

This week on the blog, I wrote about all of it. The living room grief. The mall in Manila. Dressing her for her last day. Mothering without the person who would have shown me how. And the Father who has been in every room I thought I was walking into alone.

​What It Means To Be a Motherless Mother​

And if you go read it, you'll find the verse I keep coming back to. The one I did not expect to stop me the way it did.

In Deuteronomy 31:8, God said it to Joshua right before Joshua walked into something he had never done before, without the only leader he had ever known beside him.

Read it once. Then read it again with your own name in it.

He already went ahead of you into tomorrow.

If this is where you are right now, I write letters like this every Tuesday. I'll meet you in your inbox.

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With love,

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