International Women’s Day & Grief

When you’re struggling to manage the ‘juggle’ and the ‘having it all’.

On International Women’s Day there’s so much talk of inspirational women. But what about when you’re living without your mum, your partner, your person? When there’s an empty space at every milestone. When the day feels less like a celebration and more like yet another reminder of who’s missing.

Grief doesn’t take the day off because it’s a celebration. And this post is for the women who are carrying that.

Doing It Without Them

Maybe you lost your mum or dad. Maybe your partner. Maybe your best friend, or the version of your life you thought you'd have.

Maybe you're mothering your own children without the person who was supposed to be beside you for all of it. No phone call to make when it gets hard. No one who loves them the way they would have. No one who knows you the way they did.

That grief sits in the ordinary moments. A first day of school. A hard diagnosis. A Tuesday when you just really needed their voice. It's not dramatic. It's just always there.

Grief takes many shapes. And today, every single one of them is valid.

The Showing Up Nobody Sees

You are showing up. Every single day. For your kids, your work, your life. Getting through the school runs and the meetings and the meals and the bedtimes. Functioning, from the outside, completely fine.

But nobody really sees what it costs you. The decisions made alone at midnight. The milestones with an empty space in them. The nights when the quiet is just too loud.

You are carrying so much. And you are doing it so quietly.

When You Feel Like a Stranger to Yourself

Grief has a way of making you a stranger to yourself. You used to know who you were. What you wanted. What made you happy. What your life was for. And then loss came, and shifted everything, and now some days you’re just getting through.

That’s not weakness. That’s not you failing. That’s what loss does. It changes the shape of you. And finding yourself again - or finding a new version of yourself - takes time, and gentleness, and more patience than anyone tells you to expect.

The Room Full of People

Grief can be the loneliest thing. Not because there’s nobody around you. But because the one person you want to talk to is the one who’s gone. You can be in a room full of people who love you and still feel completely alone in it.

That’s not you being difficult. That’s not you failing to move on or be grateful. That’s grief being grief. It is specific, and it is relentless, and it does not care how much support you have around you.

You Are Allowed

You are allowed to not be ok. You are allowed to find this day hard. You are allowed to scroll past the celebrations and feel something complicated about them.

You are also allowed to grieve and still want joy. To miss someone terribly and still laugh today. To be in the middle of the hardest thing and still deserve care, and rest, and moments that feel good.

Both can be true at the same time. Grief is not a reason to put your own needs on hold indefinitely. It is actually one of the most compelling reasons to tend to them.

You Don’t Have to Do This Alone

If this is you - if you’re doing it without them, without the life you planned, without the support you deserved - I want you to know that you don’t have to keep pretending it’s fine.

You don’t have to have it figured out. You don’t have to be further along than you are. You just have to keep going. And if today that feels like too much, that’s ok too.

What you are carrying is real. And you are not alone in it. 🧡

I see you. Happy International Women’s Day.