Folks threatened to overflow out of the 400 seat funeral home. People were standing up at the back. One gentleman stood upright, arms crossed, staring straight ahead —the fire captain who pulled my daughter’s broken body from the flaming wreck of her car. He’d seen the worst of the worst and retired days later. No whispers made it out of the pews and up toward the cathedral ceiling. I made sure my smile filled up the room. An armour against the hundreds of eyes trying to read my state of mind.

‘That was far too much smiling for a mother at her kid’s funeral’ I thought later.

Five minutes until go-time and my husband brings me a wisp of a thing to meet. Blond and tiny, just like our Chloe, I am introduced to Kyla. I may have heard her name in passing, but at that moment I could not fathom why she was taking up space in front of me. Kyla was asking to say a few words about Chloe when the time came.

Of course she could. I sure as hell wasn’t going to.

Looking back, I could tell this tiny 19-year-old was utterly nervous. I had no room to care. My entire being said my role trumped hers. A blond baby chick, pushing herself far beyond her comfort zone to speak in front of hundreds, was honorable, but I was greeting guests, hosting, and wrestling with the fact that I myself couldn’t get up there.

Now, I’m not afraid of public speaking.
I’ve played a circus ringmaster for God’s sake. Whip included.

The reason I couldn’t go in front of this crowd was because I could not think one honest and nice thing to say about my daughter.

The cello began its gentle lament and we all sat enveloped in the hard pews.

The funeral was MC’d by a friend, but my husband Jason was the showstopper. You’ve never seen a funeral like this. I have no idea how he professionally facilitated the crowd at his own daughters funeral. He had people program his number into their phones if they ever needed someone to talk to.

Grampa read a poem. Chloe’s teacher pulled from a deep well of caring.

It was comforting to learn this tiny wisp named Kyla was Chloe’s best friend. They shared many adventures. I was glad to hear she had someone besides her sister to confide in. I had never met her and barely heard her name in passing.

Kyla was such a good friend in fact that she was the only friend with the clarity of mind NOT to send us grieving parents photos (for the obligatory slideshow) that included giant bongs and giant bottles of rose. May we all have friends whose first instinct is to protect our reputation after death.

As it happens, it was not just facing the crowd that had scared young Kyla.
It was facing me.
The Mother.
The woman she had heard insane stories about.

She might as well have just walked straight up and surrendered to Medusa.

Chloe’s stories about me included this shiny beast:

I used her father’s drinking as a reason to send her into foster care, where the first family was nice, but the second one repeatedly raped her.

I haven’t been brave enough to ask what other stories Chloe told. That one stung enough.

I find that a mother’s hurt gets shoved in a box these days.

Social media gives the impression that we aren’t allowed to be hurt by our children’s responses to us because those responses are our fault. The children needed to be held more gently. We parents must atone for our sins.

Even though I gave all my gentle.

It wasn’t a lot.

I admit.

I made her touch the raw chicken.
Rake leaves with bugs hiding inside.
Walk in the drizzle.

But I gave predictability. I gave expert lice-combing. It was not enough to keep her alive. That wasn’t solely up to me.

Am I hurt that my care was not received? That I was painted a Gorgon monster?

I’m hurt that I didn’t get anything back, yes.

Period.

The explanations — she had deep trauma, the step-mom never gets the good stuff, you’re too German — don’t take that away.

What does soothe is time. It’s in the past. Every day I wake up and can create my days, my life, with whatever story suits me. It’s the next tremendous responsibility.

There is no correct way to love.

We see what works, what doesn’t, and hopefully adapt.

And then pray that all that adapting lines up with how your child develops.

Well — we didn’t line up Chloe and me. Hence the mythic hate.

It’s been a few years since the funeral, and we’ve kept in touch with the gentle girl who was our daughter’s best friend.

She is attentive to the suffering of others. Hardworking. Earnest. Charming.

She’s been through the wringer. Every social worker’s filing cabinet is filled with what this gal has endured.

These are the honest and nice things I can finally say about Chloe too.

I consciously tried to heed that wise advice.

Then, I made a major financial move - I bought a car.

Not out of excitement or retail therapy or some glossy desire for newness. Honestly, I barely remember that year at all. It lives behind frosted glass. But I do remember the way my old car started to feel like a threat every time I slid into the driver’s seat — a simmering panic for which I didn’t yet have words.

The trusty steed I gave up was a beautiful VW wagon. The one I drove the kids to school in every morning, the one with crumbs from a hundred breakfasts and the smell of wet mittens baked into the seats. I’d poured money into keeping her alive — three major repairs in one year, including fixing the back end after a friend borrowed it and totaled it. We didn’t make it through that.

I loved that car. I ache for it now.
But at the time, every new sound that old car made felt like a warning. Every light on the dashboard suggested catastrophe. Every time I turned the key, something in my chest tightened, like I was bracing for another phone call that would split my life in two.

I didn’t understand why I was suddenly so stressed about a car. If it broke, I could just fix it like I always did. I like using things right up. I’m the one who uses a spatula in the mayo jar.

From here, I can see that I wasn’t connecting the dots between “my car is getting old” and “my daughter died in a car accident.”

I wasn’t at all worried about my car failing and getting hurt even though that’s how it seemed to be pouring out.

I just knew I couldn’t handle one more thing being UNHANDLED.
One more thing that could go wrong without warning.
One more reminder that life can break open with zero notice.

So I bought another Volkswagen.
Newer and safer. Also boring in that responsible way.
But it wasn’t haunted.

The dealership guy was a total dick salesman. He never returned my emails when I found parts of the old car he might want for resale. Or when I found the second key. He had no concept of what I was letting go with this sale. Neither did I really.

Then there’s a part I don’t love admitting.
Some of the money came from the fundraiser people set up for us after Chloe died.

So many sent money because they didn’t know what else to do.
Some of it went to therapy.
Some went to replace income and buy food.
Some went to the fog.

Some went to the entirely overpriced cardboard box that is the bare minimum container legally required for cremation.

And some went to a new car.

I told myself I only used a little.
That it was there to make our lives easier.
That I could have afforded it anyway.
And all of that is true.

But no one asks what you do with “dead-kid money.”
They don’t ask anything that first year.
You’re radioactive. If you said you spent it on a clown college tuition, people would nod solemnly and tell you they’re proud of you for “taking steps.”

The ugliest thought I had — the one I shoved as far back as it would go — was this:

Chloe wrecked a bunch of lives. At the very least she owes me is a new car since I’m the one here picking up the pieces.

(Ugh - I know.)

Grief is not known for its digestible morsels.

That first year, I stopped cooking and so I ate in the car constantly — drive-through wrappers shoved into that car door cavern at my hip. Dinners in parking lots where I’d scroll and scroll. In a year where I remember so very little, I CAN recall the exact ratio of lettuce to Big Mac sauce of the burger I ate while parked outside yet another thrift store inhaling the written wit of Lila, connection artist, on Substack. All the while, that car held me.

The new car became an unnamed symbol. Not a joy but just a little something that hadn’t been involved in anything catastrophic. A neutral object in a year that felt akin to wading through spent raspberry bushes.

I held the wheel too tightly on that first drive.
I definitely remember the silence.
Chloe’s bio mum even showed up in ghost form a few times — a raised eyebrow in the passenger seat.

It took more than a year to understand why I needed a new car so urgently:
I couldn’t survive one more surprise. Not one more thing dying without warning.

People like to give rules for grief:
Don’t sell the house. Don’t renovate.
Don’t start something new. Don’t end anything.

I followed some of it by accident. Ignored some with intent.

And then there were choices like buying a a new car — decisions I made for reasons I couldn’t yet name, and had to live with until the truth floated to the surface.

Now, years later, I miss my old VW wagon.
I miss how it was built.
How it held the girls and their backpacks and their bickering.
It carried all the versions of me I no longer am.

The new car is fine.
It’s FINE.

It hasn’t done anything important yet: no school runs, no Halloween costumes in the trunk. Maybe it won’t. It’s not sentimental or sacred.

It’s just a tool.

I didn’t buy healing.
I didn’t buy closure.

I bought one small place in my world where nothing was allowed to implode.

I just wanted to feel safe.

A giant rehashing of every parenting decision I ever made.

How could you not question your parenting decisions after your child makes a series of horrible decisions landing her in the newspaper and a cheap cardboard box that is required by law in order to cremate all ninety of her?

Chloe was my step daughter - if we’re going to be exact.

Her mother died and I took up the gauntlet. It was a beautiful choice. I stand by it.

Chloe was only 6 years old, her sister 5, when their mother had had enough of the torture that was this world for her. After seeing her home and the lengths she went to get well, I honoured and respected her choice. Her suffering was profound.

Naturally, that spilled over. The soul pain needs to go somewhere.

It seeped into my daughters. Their dad. Our home.

The parent you needed is not the parent your child needs.

Truth — I failed to see some things.

Me, the ever-observant! I didn’t see how much they needed something even tinier than baby steps. I was proficient in structure and safety. Kids need that it’s true. I thought I was patient. I can take apart a sump pump and almost put it back together. I am installing a new motor in the dishwasher next week. I’ve never done that before and I will take my time. And still… I’m learning there was a patience I didn’t have.

Still don’t have.

The story I’m telling myself today is that I didn’t see what those motherless children needed because I didn’t like their needs. An excerpt of that list of needs that were unmet goes something like this:

• drive them to school when it’s raining and the sidewalk is covered in worms (of which they are petrified) and they are embarrassed by umbrellas. (Too soft.)

• calm and understanding when one lied about eating the cucumbers in her lunch right after I found them under her bed. (I could have gotten curious instead of furious.)

• Listening to any of their stories past 9pm. (I could have tried toothpicks to keep my eyes open.)

I’m sure I’ll get told at some point all the rest of the needs I failed to fulfil.

So yes - I’m rehashing the details of my parenting but it’s more than that.

It’s a rehashing of the tone.

Condescending. Disappointed. Probably some other sad, sad realizations too.

I ran a Martha Stewart household (hail Mother Martha) and still somehow felt like a guest in it. I was a stepmother who gave up having biological children because it felt noble — and then slowly discovered these darlings were strangers to my language. Every gesture of care, misread. Every standard, resented.

So here I am saying I wish I could have done some things differently. Adapted faster. Seen them as they were instead of who I was pushing them to be.

And yet —

I like high standards. I like order, honesty and sitting at the table together every night.
I like cake forks and writing letters to the Queen to ask how she eats spaghetti. I like the participants of cooking and crafting to participate in the clean up too.

Compassion says I did what I could with the resources and the nervous system that I had. Even so, I can entertain that I walk with some regrets.

I delighted in my children when they participated in my script:

find the Easter eggs I hid too well — dress for Sunday dinner at great-grandma’s nursing home — hug Mickey Mouse at Disney — enjoy back-to-school shopping

I did not delight in my children when they:

got mediocre grades even though they tried hard — attempted to make a casserole that went awry — made forts — ran to the trampoline in their sock feet

I was being honest. I am being honest. I didn’t and don’t like those things.

If you’ll excuse the rhetorical question pile up1, I have some reflecting to do:

Does that mean I am not evolved enough as a parent?
Would I have liked those things in my biological children?
How much of my beliefs and values was I supposed to sacrifice for them to feel supported and comfortable?

I thought my children’s comfort was my top priority. Proper duvets, clean sheets, balanced meals, new experiences, cold drinks, all types of freezie pops - both home-made and commercial garbage.

And yet. They were wholly uncomfortable with me.

Me too guys. As it turns out, me too.

My takeaway is that even the stress of global warming comes with benefits.

I have had practice with this. The large-scale kind.

So yes, the stress of your child dying a horrible (but mercifully quick) death, comes with benefits.

When sudden life-altering change comes to you there’s no one sitting on your shoulder to show you, three years out, the good that can come from such a shock. You’d not be able to hear it anyway.

We are in the midst of all sorts of change being foisted upon us every day though aren’t we? Having allowed our daughter’s death to settle into a nest in my heart, here are the other transitions I now recognize as grief. I give time to them as all losses are worthy of a note.

This one scrapes away at my long-time personality: I am no longer efficient at the grocery store. Putting items on the conveyer belt in what I think is a grand order, aimed at making the bagging lego-logical — keeping the cold, cold — simply doesn’t happen anymore. The last cashier actually looked at me pityingly as I proudly displayed my goods in what I thought was the best order.

The brain cells I’ve lost from trauma and grief snort with laughter in many tiny ways each day. In this case the only benefit is that I can be really convincing when I play baffled and the cashier helps me bag.

Here’s another grief that, thanks to a female body of a certain age, really frosts my socks:

Coffee. My one blessed morning sacrament. She’s leaving me. Single plantation, local roaster, small-business-supporting beans. Freshly ground. Stinking up my backpack on the way home from the market. A morning cup, milky and sweet… she’s a great loss for me. It’s simply a ritual my stomach no longer tolerates more than twice a month. But with that comes a calmer nervous system and new flights of fancy like matcha or yerba mate. Not sure yet, that’s good enough.

Sadly, a wine buzz while making dinner no longer hits the same either. If I get haughty (and I do) I’ll exchange a glass of wine for horrific sleep and a case of the angries the next day. At my house we’ve dubbed any occasional liquor beverage ‘Angry Juice’. This includes the small glass of beer so well-earned after hard work. I take this as a slight to my European heritage. Work hard, play healthily? Just doesn’t satisfy me.

‘Just doesn’t satisfy you yet.’ I try and convince myself. I am hoping to build a nourishing softness that supports these bones. This body.

I can tell you that these seemingly small griefs add up. But there is a benefit to every loss. As in nature, something always back fills the torn up yard, the drained pond. Something comes. You might not prefer it, but growth continues.

And so it is with losing my daughter.

Her absence has created a space for connection with my other daughter that wasn’t possible in the same way.

Her absence means that my brain has space to worry about things other than her midnight escapades, her mental health.

Her absence means we get to help other families struggling in a way that is truly connecting. We get it now. There is a soft solidarity in that. You can’t fake it. You can’t get it from your therapist.

The depth that we get to feel goes both ways too. Deep loss and sadness means an opening to joy too. Does it not?

I’ll let you know when I see it.

There was a day early on in my recent trip to Australia where I was standing at the front of a whale watching tour boat. Two other women came to stand at the bow. Two grey haired’s and me. We were quiet. The wind whipping easy words away before they were even spoken. Soaking it in.

I was curious about them. Two women a little older than me, traveling alone. I hadn’t met many women my age traveling alone yet. Three women, cameras in hand, eyes to the horizon looking to the future.

Right off the bat though, I was thrown. In an urge to connect with others after so much alone time I broke the reverie and offered up that I had left my husband at home in Canada for three (or four) months to take care of the dog. Grabbing onto the railing as the boat lifted over the waves, the whitest haired of the two’s eyes grew larger:

“Your husband LET you?”

Oh lady.

I didn’t know what to say.

A fierceness came up my throat. Proud as a winning racehorse I exclaimed: ‘He didn’t have a choice!”

Truth is - he had choice. He made a fabulous choice. To support me in my journey and confront his grief without distraction. I got a good one.

But also - I made a strong choice. One that not many women make at this stage.
I’m still deciding or rather, feeling out, what this trip meant for me as a person. I grew in ways I didn’t expect and for sure will never stay in another hostel as long as I live. So, goodbye to that anyway.

Taking my one remaining daughter for part of that journey is a choice I will never regret. While she struggled to find comfort in so many new places on the journey, she returned home with a new and confident strut. I’m talking about making dentist appointments and deep decluttering after a lifetime of attachment trauma hoarding. New hair! New job! Applying for school! I look forward to the day she has words to describe what the experience was like for her.

After weeks of travelling as a duo then dropping her at a train station (and to her dismay, giving her my extra luggage to drag home) I sunk deep into travelling solo as a 47 year old woman. Isolated cabins in Tasmanian rainforests. Dank city hostels and luxury shacks on the sea. It was incredibly freeing. I now see my favourite seaside shack on Pinterest all.the.time.

In the five year lead up to my epic travel adventure, our kid died.

I didn’t have even a nugget of brain power to daydream about the Australian adventure I’d been holding in my heart since I was a young sprout. Our griefy world was consumed by waking up, sitting on the couch and staring at each other. I don’t remember sleeping but know that I slept a great deal. There was nothing beyond getting through the moment.

I had recently found myself in a place where I had less mom-ing to do. Our girl had recently moved out of the family home but my mind was still, as any mom knows, considering my child. Her comfort, her choices, how she showed up to dinner by hitting the curb with her car and then nearly falling asleep at the table.

When Chloe died I immediately noticed what I didn’t have to notice anymore: I didn’t have to worry about our risk-taking, lying, traumatized daughter anymore. That was a huge worry off my plate. I had freedom from the rumours of fentanyl-tainted weed, blackouts at bars and resorts, random men giving her cash ‘for no reason’ in line at the convenience store. Relief poured through me.

Much to my husband’s dismay, I started to think of myself as retired from active-duty motherhood. Untethering from a 20-year identity.

What could be categorized as relief didn’t create S P A C E in this case. The void was quickly filled with the detailed horrors of her violent, sudden death and the fall out from the choices she made. The impact Chloe had on all of us, in life and in death, was profound. We all needed to process. Hell, we’re still processing.

When your kid dies, you’re literally not in your right mind. Your body freezes and your brain is just fried. Those nervous breakdowns with prescriptions for seaside air? It’s like that with a hefty dose of veterinary tranquilizers. Senior dog people will get it. Stumbling around, head down, bumping into walls before the x-ray.

We’ve been all over the place: blame, shame, pain, both physical and psychic pain. We’ve been to depression town and obsession town.

For us in this dead-kid club, I can understand the unconscious impulses to try and escape the greyest fog ever created. Miraculously, I didn’t try and drink the discomfort away, smoke it away, or eat it away. Okay, so I tried to thrift it away but that’s another story.

Relevant here though is that with our child’s death, all plans were on hold indefinitely.

Including my lifelong dream to go to Australia.

I’d been saving aggressively for years. The departure goal was 2025. Two years after her death. I was still in the conceptual phase of planning. I wasn’t quite sure what this dream trip looked like. Was my husband coming with me? Was I going for weeks? Months? Which months? All I knew was that it was important enough to save a chunk of cash every month. I trusted my intuition. This dream-trip-souffle would not deflate.

I was called.

We’d been sitting in that damn grieving room for at least a year when I started to hear the clock ticking.

Australia had beckoned since I was a teenager. She started calling me again.

I started to take baby steps as a small antidote to grief.

I brought up the theoretical trip more often. I followed travel influencers.

The trip shifted from menu-peeping to appetizer-ordering. I changed all my passwords to some version of !Australia2025!.

I highly recommend having to type in your goal multiple times a day.

Having something to look forward to - it felt like a basic survival skill.

I didn’t just up and leave all the things I did at home. Please.

I did front-load it though.

I decluttered hard. I put dish detergent on repeat delivery.

I went pretty hog wild with simplifying the home’s systems. That meant leaving only one laundry detergent out and available instead of my highly specific anti-dirt allies. It meant, preemptively replacing the water filters, the furnace filter, giving my best plants to the neighbours to keep alive. Clarifying the dog’s food plan and taping it to the wall. At eye-level.

I hid the good towels.

It sounds kind of rude, eh? Like, ‘can’t you trust your husband to water the plants’? Actually, no. They were mostly all dead when I got home but that’s not the point. The point is I didn’t expect him to run a home like an expert when it’s never been his responsibility. I do trust him to respond by throwing money at things. By the same token, he’s not going to have me take over programming some AI model if he takes a month off. To be honest, this was a tough letting go for me but letting go was now part of my resume.

Look—

I could spin this a number of ways and add a bunch of meaning that is not yet clear.

It might read like,
“Three years after our daughters death I needed space to grieve my own way so I left home for three months.” But I wasn’t actively grieving anymore. I was ready to build my self concept again. Something beyond the ‘lady whose kid died’.

I might have written,
”Distance makes the heart grow fonder.” But I didn’t miss my husband once on this trip. I was occupying my own life. Leaving my deeply grieving husband at home so I could travel the length of Australia for 3 months was good.

Good for me. And ultimately, him.

I went because I could.
Because I’m still here. On Earth. In this strong marriage.

Consider this a hello to more adventure beyond grief.

Hello to all the dessert.

The very first coherent thing I said to my husband when our daughter died was this:

“We are not going to let this break us up. We will not be those people.”

A serious proclamation swiftly followed by a four hour drive in a blinding Canadian snow storm to pick up our one remaining daughter before she could wake up to social media telling her that her sister was dead.

I decided from the outset how I would grieve.

Steadily.

With patience.

A dash of complexity.

That was the recipe.

I got on with the practical steps of addressing our daughter’s death as my husband folded onto the floor like a wet washcloth.

To me, it was obvious we were witnessing the sequel to the catastrophe we’d already endured. In the universe’s ongoing clerical chaos, I found myself suddenly plus or minus children.

The fluttery infatuation of a relationship with my now husband really kicked into high gear 20 years ago, at the moment his first wife died. We had been dating less than six months and yet I chose to become a mum that day. I scooped him and his two girls up and did what I knew created order: cooking, cleaning, wash the sheets, draw the kids’ baths.

It was fabulously naive. The details so dramatic I could probably find a market for the movie rights.

Random estranged family members made the burial arrangements. I wore bright green tights to the funeral to make sure there was still something of me in my day. Or perhaps as an introduction to the family. It was the tiny bit of Self I could cling to in the hurricane. We weren’t just playing lovebirds anymore. There was adulting to do.

After surreptitiously removing a rosary from the embalmed hands of his dead first wife my guy was firmly in survival mode for the next five years. Being the more distanced adult, the super-capable and practical me came forward and took over as much as I could. Picking up washcloths, indeed.

The first weeks were intense. It began with a veritable soccer team of book club members who poured out of a van and rallied to clean out what was a whole-damn-life left in the rented house of a woman I met only once. I barely knew what to do with the gaggle of women (whom I had never met) attending to the details of their friend who took her own life. Yet, somehow I had elected myself as lady in charge.

Nothing really prepares you for kneeling on the bedroom floor of your boyfriend’s first wife’s house across from your future mother-in-law holding a black garbage bag, the two of you throwing away perfectly good sex toys.

Sifting through this woman’s pain I could see the lengths she went to in order to get well. To pull herself from the brink of mania over and over. To maintain a control that would allow her to be the mother she never had. Meditation CDs, essential oils, health food, and Eckhart Tolle’s complete collection. She was tidy and sentimental. She had good taste in bedding. The bathtub was still full. Oatmeal crusted the water line. She’d performed a cleansing ritual before taking her life. I pulled the plug.

What would the girls like to have of their mother’s things in the future? The huge responsibility of being the keeper of their mother’s details washed over me. Their dad was in a tailspin and certainly not a details guy. He came from a throw-away family. I came from a keep-it family. What was stored and what was donated was left up to me. It was easy to slide into Matriarch. I kept as much as I could. I wanted to know the woman who bore the children that were now under my care. I wanted to be able to tell them about her. I wanted to know her mothering philosophy. What of her wishes for her own motherhood could I help to carry on? What could I throw away? Cupcake baking on a Saturday afternoon? Keep. Flintstone vitamins. Nope.

Of course, I also didn’t want to be responsible for throwing away the keepsakes that a child would eventually yearn for. I didn’t want to be blamed. I wanted the girls to have every memory honoured. The softness of a fleece jacket. The flimsy jewelry box full of mid grade silver and turquoise baubles. All things their mom touched were fair game.

I read this dead woman’s books and listened to every CD. I learned her middle name. Her hair products are long since used up. I absorbed what I could.

I still wear her jacket sometimes.

My super-human strength lasted a solid two weeks.

I crashed hard.

One night after a taco dinner, I started throwing up every 20 minutes. The other end was also working in a projectile fashion.

After twelve straight hours I called for mercy. I timed my taxi ride to the hospital to fall between upchucks.

I spent four days in hospital in isolation. Nurses had to suit up to even enter the room. The doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I was instructed not to flush so he could look directly into the toilet blessings. Eventually, they plied me with fluids and anti-nauseants made for cancer patients. I slept fitfully. The vibe I got from the staff was that I had the flu and I was a needy whiner.

I didn’t want to leave. There was no one to catch me. Feed me.

I remember the nurse filling out my release paperwork asking if I’d been under any stress. Ummm — yes?

That tiny question brought into focus the enormity of what had just happened.

Fifteen years later, our daughter Chloe died in a horrific car crash. She nearly took four people with her.

For a long time the common belief has been that child loss equalled marriage demise.

I can see why. I went into this grief believing it might break us. But it turns out that’s not what the research says. Divorce is not a foregone conclusion of child loss. That’s nice to hear.

But damn — what I’ve experienced is that the way each person grieves is astoundingly different. And for us, for a short time, it created a deep valley between my husband and me. We’ve given and taken so much space in this grief. Building a life has been on pause. No room for life’s sweetness. No room for sugar.

The marriage held.

That has required patience and the oft-murmured goal that we would come back to the same side of the mountain. Hopefully it’s the side with the ski chalet. I think we’re there now, splitting a plate of pommes frites with mayo.

This past Christmas, the third since Chloe’s death, we noticed something. An ornament - a clear plastic ball with a picture of Chloe and her bio mum - has our daughter sporting angel wings at just one year old. How had we not noticed until now?

Thanks universe. That’s some ugly foreshadowing.

This mum is grateful that our daughter has a momma where she is too. While I am physically down one kid, I am still a momma of two.

Let’s say, I’ve never been good at paperwork.

Hey.

So it’s my dead kid’s birthday.

What does a person do on a day such as this?

In the interest of supporting your social voyeurism here’s a super honest description of how I’m spending the day. I’m not judging me but you can if you like.

I spent my daughter’s birthday buying things for other kids. Wrapping things for other kids. Thinking about other kids’ needs. Their cheese preferences. Their preferred crackers. Procuring said nibblies the holiday gathering.

Basically, I ran errands and ate crap.

Let me catch you up. Here’s the cast of characters:

Chloe - dead child who would have been 22 today. She’s been gone nearly 3 years.
Jason - my husband and Chloe’s bio dad.
Melody - Chloe’s younger sister. My other daughter. Jason’s bio daughter.
Cindy - dead bio mum to Chloe and Melody.
Me - self-elected mother to Chloe and Melody for 15 years.
Arlo - canine mascot.

So let’s get real. On my dead daughters birthday this is what I did:

I begin with typical house things for a Tuesday. I do however, give it some extra caffeinated verve. This is called coping. Getting laser-focused and fierce with the holiday to-do’s started with a strong cup of tea with milk and maple syrup. This fueled the emptying of the dishwasher, loading of the dishwasher, and the hand washing of the hand-wash items. Then I switch over the laundry. I feed the dog. One cup of tea does nothing so adrenaline and cortisol pick up the slack.

Boring so far, right?

I convince myself that the tea doesn’t count as breaking my fast and think it would be good to extend that fast after the coping-burger I had last night at 8pm, I leave the house without eating a healthy breakfast. I know where this will land me and push through my hunger anyway. I’ve recently been facing hunger and staring her down instead of letting her boss me around. It feels good to have a relationship with hunger again. I won’t die if I wait another hour to eat when there are better choices. I don’t NEED a cheeseburger this INSTANT as much as I did in the last three years since Chloe died. Except last night.

I put together some Christmas gifts for my niece and nephew. They’re getting a ‘bed in a basket’ so I stuff\ pillow cases with fresh pillows and pull duvets through their covers. I package it up in a brand new laundry basket as they are getting new bedrooms this holiday. I realize this ‘gift’ is a semi-covert injection of ‘orderliness’ and is not everyone’s idea of a present but cleanliness is next to godliness, no? I move all the plants and furniture from where the Christmas tree will go. I wipe up the mould on the floor from where my hubby overwatered the monstera while I was away for the last three months. I make a list of all the stops I need to make to create the holiday magic and what to get at each store. Ask the household if they needed anything — I hear bananas.

Knowing this day is especially hard for my husband and daughter, knowing they haven’t had the cycles to be proactive in taking good care of themselves on this day in the past, I gently suggest an itinerary to help fill their day:

1. go to first wife/bio mum’s grave

2. go get Christmas tree

It’s a short road trip that can be quiet. Can be filled with drive-through, icy Diet Pepsi, their mutual comfort drink. Or the drive might lead to important conversations like how they’re feeling about the fact that we (finally) sent in the request to bury Chloe’s ashes with her mum.

We all leave the house on our separate quests.

Boring errands include stopping to get a security tag taken off a previous purchase of pyjamas for my niece.

I then stop for three things at Costco.

I leave with 27 items. Mostly crackers. I go overboard on cheese (some might say that’s not possible). I buy a giant brick of marble cheese that no alive person in our family likes. But Chloe liked it so into the cart it goes.

I cap off Costco consumerism by succumbing to their insultingly cheap pizza slice. I pull my cart close to a stand-up table. It looks like I’m guarding my groceries. I’m not. I’m blocking myself in against a wall and feel protected. At least I make an occasion of it and take off my jacket and hat to eat. Never before have I dabbed napkins on a pizza slice to soak up grease but today I do. It would have dripped down my wrist and into my sleeves I’m sure. This greasy slice should have tasted good. It should have been satisfying in that disgusting way all greasy foods are. I’m sad to report that it was terrible. Salt wouldn’t even have helped this thing. Why is it that they can’t make it taste good? Food science says they could. Why WON’T they?

For this and many other reasons, I won’t be renewing my membership.

When my girls lost their bio mum at ages 5 & 6 I was a human on the periphery of their lives. I think I had braided their hair once. I was that lady who came and drank beers with their dad one time on a hot summer day.

When Cindy died I swooped in and provided the second lap upon which these girls sat during their mum’s funeral. Intense times. I signed up to be an instant mom.

Someone else must have found it overwhelming as well because they spelled Chloe’s name wrong on her mum’s headstone.

Can you imagine showing up to your mum’s grave and your name is spelled wrong? In STONE. I don’t care what the reason was, even the most understanding of us would feel some sort of awful way. I never wanted to kids to see this mistake.

During the graveside burial neither child noticed the misspelling. I’m grateful.

I could not let that monument stand. As soon as I could I had that headstone remade.

No questions were asked. Not even, ‘and who are you to the deceased?’. I must have sounded legit.

Jason cried big, fat, man tears when I handed over the sketch that was sent as a proof for the new headstone. To this day I haven’t been able to procure a better gift. It makes birthdays and holidays awkward. I’m now labeled as a lame gift-giver after so many second-rate presents.

Need a fabulous gift this year? Try a sketch of headstone.

If you’re a holiday-maker you’ll know that Costco didn’t have all the goodies that set a scene resembling a Martha Stewart magazine from the 90’s (still my inner standard, praise be the queen of hospitality) so it was off to the big box grocery store for the once-a-year candy cane ice cream. I wanted only 5 things. I came out with 30.

This is what coping looks like. I know it. You know it. Let’s nod at each other in mutual understanding from across the room. At least I got myself a bottle of water. Self-care, right?

The water is too cold to drink and hurts my teeth so instead of making another stop I head home, cutting my errands short. I have ice cream so I don’t know why I had another stop on my list. Logistics have failed me for the three years since Chloe’s death. I’m mostly back on the trolley but not today folks. Not today.

I used to love resourcing my home. Now, unloading the car is a hassle. And it’s during the unload that I too must, umm — unload. I have to poop.

Chloe in her ghostly form has a sense of humour so as I’m sitting down reviewing my grocery receipt and all the points I will be awarded if I just go back in the next 5 days and show this receipt while standing on my tippy toes I hear Chloe’s memorial windchimes clanging outside the window. It’s like she’s clapping at my pink crap. Bravo Mother - you ate your red beets and you’ve won Christmas all in the same 24 hours.

Thanks, girl. I don’t get tired of her nods from the ether.

I have another cup of tea and sit outside with the dog who doesn’t give a shit what day it is as long as it’s a day where I throw the frisbee. Between throws I sit with my head down, forearms resting on my thighs. From a distance I probably look hungover. This posture kind of makes me feel hungover. There’s no chance of that though since even one drink makes my menopausal body respond with a night time circus of restlessness and itchy legs. The sun is warm and bright. My bony ass melts the snow patch on the raised bed I’m perched upon. My tea gets cold too quickly. I guzzle the second half back and head inside. Any sad feelings have been avoided. I just can’t sit undistracted too long.

Rounding the corner to the kitchen to pre-heat the oven for the healthy dinner i’ve planned the display greets me with 4:44. The same numbers Chloe had tattooed on her arm right before she died. The same numbers I’ve been seeing all week. The same numbers Jason now has on his arm. We are meaning-making machines. No Chloe tattoos for me though. I give up on making dinner.

I sit down for a scroll (and some room temperature water) and a person comes to the door. I see that it is one of Melody’s friends with cookies and flowers. I wave, wait, then rescue the blooms from the cold. I am not prepared to talk to anyone in person. I open the cookies before I’ve even set them down. I stuff one in my mouth and take one to savour. When I’m done I wonder where the second cookie went. I don’t remember eating it.

Jason and Melody get home from the grave site with a lightness I’m glad to see. They ask me why I didn’t get a tree.

This is what grief does.

They somehow heard that I’m getting a tree. The tree I had tasked them with getting.

That’s now tomorrows task. Feathering the nest and providing a safe place to land.

See you there.

Love,
Mother T

It’s a thick linen artisan piece. Oatmeal and gray with a giant pocket that holds elastic bands, a Sharpie and a lighter. My phone tucks in there too, as does a thin french tea towel that I can’t let my family use. It’s too soft. Too expensive. The latest nice thing I’m hiding from them.

The apron drapes down to mid shin. The bottom half is split into two pieces, meant to wrap around each leg when you sit at your potters wheel. There are snaps down the front to go full kitchen style. She is sturdy and meant to last a lifetime.

It feels as though it’s time to hang up this uniform of mom.

[Ok you got me. The actual apron I will never let go. The very, very French woman who sold it to me insisted that I wear it with a little bit of lingerie while pottering around in the garden. I hold fast to that vision.]

It’s the mom title that needs retiring. I’ve been softly focused on shedding it since my kid died 2.5 years ago. I exhaled a little that day. Our other daughter is now firmly in her twenties. She’s got her shit together. I did my duty. I poured all I had into their brains and onto their plates. I even enjoyed it. Now though, there’s so much less for me to do as mom. My purpose is ready for that empty-nest reconfigure thing.

Daydreaming what the next phase look like can be pretty exciting. I mean, blank slate, right? I practice more often with, “I’m a photographer, I’m a writer, I’m a creative sort.” I nuzzle up to design-adjacent content and we sip tea together. It seems like a gentle glide into what retirement looks like. Slower. Puttering. No sudden epiphanies here.

I am, however, here to talk about the Griefs.

Last week I asked my daughter what her favourite home made meal is. What is your comfort food? Actually, she asked me (pasta bolognese) then I threw it back at her.

After thoughtful consideration, “breakfast potatoes.” She was clear and confident.

I’m so glad she was honest but hear this: I personally do not make ‘breakfast potatoes’. Her father does. My husband slices GMO bulk baby potatoes in half, drowns them in oil before the pan is even hot, adds dried sticks of rosemary that are a relic of my first marriage and the spice rack I got as a wedding present. He pushes them around an enormously deep frying pan with a plastic spatula until the smoke alarm goes off. I don’t believe foods are often over-salted but yes, these are. These greasy beasts are then drowned in a bright red ketchup product. The leftovers, because there are always leftovers, are tucked away in the fridge still hot, uncovered, to be nuked the next day.

It’s not food. It’s a travesty.

The Griefs they keepacomin’.

I swear to you, I have said it once and I will say it again, I made food that was beyond restaurant quality for 15 years. Crisp schnitzel, al dente veg with flaky salt timed perfectly with the three cheese bubbling scalloped potatoes. Salads layered with only the ingredients these fuckers liked. Always a homemade dressing. I made dutch babies with cool berries and freshly whipped cream with real vanilla. And crepes as per my childhood.

If I asked my family today what a dutch baby is they would shrug.

’Dunno.’

One random day many moons ago, my husband started making pancakes from a mix (yes, Costco strikes again). The children they sat at the kitchen island shovelling and slurping and chatting with glee while I slunk back into the other room and sadly realized something.

It’s not what you make but how you make them feel. Duh, right?

I got the memo way too late. I prioritized the food, the actual physical organic nourishing, hoping to instill in them something akin to a palate.

I launched at their open mouths great food with a rousing narrative: ‘Look at this glorious feast I am bestowing upon you! Let’s say some sort of syrupy grace and talk about the three farms I visited to get this meat and produce.’

What I thought was enthusiasm was taken and transformed into a shame for not appreciating it enough.

I’m told I come across with a ‘tone’. Condescending, apparently. I think I got the wrong audience.

Both things can be true.

You may not believe me but, I’m not bitter.

These were the cards I was dealt and I chose how to play my hand. What I thought we’d have is not what came. I’m just grieving it.

As I shed the role I gave my own damn self - nourisher, nurturer - I am compelled to invite into the space a new sort of woman. I can see her across the room. She looks relaxed. Feet up. Chin up.

I’ve tried asking her what she’s all about but she hasn’t said yet.

I can only suppose she’s taking a break between scenes.

Hey cool - I went viral.

My audience has doubled.

The next missive after going viral is stupidly loaded as I’m sure you’ve heard.

I subscribe to Substacks all the time based on one note or piece of writing - don’t you? That way, I’m primed to see what comes next. I’ll judge them by the next one.
Maybe you did the same here.

You newbies may be disappointed.

You see - this is Unpalatable.

Writing about the beautiful Costco haul that a stranger sent the day after my child’s death was a small wave of gratitude in a plastic pool of fuck-you pieces.

This is where I write the slimygross things about what it’s been like to be with the death of my daughter. (To catch you up, she died at 19 years old in a car crash of her own making 2.5 years ago due to a trauma history that resulting in mental health struggles the depth of which we simply couldn’t see.)

Those middle finger pieces include:

Too much shopping. // Losing my appetite. // Taking selfies at her funeral.

So maybe you’re here under false pretenses like you think I’m going to be sentimental or gentle-hearted. I’m generally not that but what I do have is grace.

Understanding.

Patience.

And a bunch of hurts.

Like the fact that my daughter Chloe and me, we did not get along. At all.

So buckle up buttercups because the next piece is a true confession.

I rode in on my broomstick.

I don’t identify as a witch but do believe spells are real.

You cast them with your words and thoughts. Those non-physical creations form your reality. So do actions. Duh - that’s why we take action.

I took some action and it bit me in the ass.

Okay - here goes:

We all know step-moms are evil. Period. I was never going to replace a dead bio-mum. I thought I did, but I didn’t. My kid hated me.

To be fair, it was complicated, but the gist is, we didn’t get along.

Here is my true confession:

I rode in on my step-mother broomstick and parked that thing in the corner where I then turned it upside down.

In witch speak, that’s a spell. It’s a spell to get someone out of your house.

And I desperately wanted my daughter out of my house.

Granted, this was 15 years into being her mother and putting my everything into raising her and her sister but this is where we found ourselves. Loggerheads.

Things were unbearable for all of us. She was shitting the nest as teenage birds do before leaving the cozy, grocery-laden confines of home. Insert list of common teenage transgressions here. Let’s also add a dash of the common flounderings of a parent facing this for the first time.

I wanted her out of my house so badly that I looked at my broom and willed with all my might that she feel unwelcome and just leave. I ceremoniously turned it upside down and stuck it in an innocuous corner of the garage. Each time I passed by I had a secret that I shared with that broom. It was an alter to the hope for change. It was nice that I didn’t have to worry that anyone would touch it. No one was brooming my domain.

That broom even had a name. It came to me as a gift and symbol of ridding oneself of terrible dreams. ‘Sweep Dreams’ was the artists incantation. Indeed.

The spell, it worked.

Chloe left. It took a whole year of muttering under my breath, ‘C’mon broom!’ each time I passed it, but it worked. She moved out.

And then she died.

That was not the type of exit I intended.

What sticks in my mouth is the bitter relief I felt alongside the sadness and shock. Her life had become unmanageable to herself and those around her.

Feel free to burn me at the virtual stake. You weren’t there.
It was literally the kindest action I could bring myself do at the time.

Yours in ugly honesty,

Tanja, the Unpalatable.

You heard my kid died and you sprang into action.

I’m not sure how you heard — probably from my husband posting his sadness on Facebook before I could even tell my own dad.

I imagine you’re the admin arm of that male-centric organization my husband worked with.
The woman who quietly carries the weight of deciding what kind of comfort can be bought and sent from another country.

When you heard that tragedy had hit the family of a man you’d come to like so much — through his entertaining training sessions and hilarious emails — what made you decide that flowers weren’t enough?
What do you know, what have you seen, that gave you the energy to compile an order so elite in its practicality that my German genes felt comforted at a soul level?

When I tell this story, I still squeal with delight at the guts it took to send such a gift.

I remember exactly zero details of the meals that were sent in the days after Chloe’s death.

I know that Janice brought soup in a yogurt container. I think it was good?
An edible arrangement tried to take up space in the fridge. I had to work hard to pawn that off piece by piece.
Okay — I now remember Jennifer’s pizza delivery. That actually cheered me up for a moment.

I also know there were those who showed up empty-handed and required tea and comfort.

But you! Costco hauler!

Woman, I fucking appreciate you.

You got shit done like a Southern hospitality prize-winner.
You nailed it for me.

I can name every single thing that was dropped off by that tentative Instacart worker.

He rang the bell that afternoon and I must have looked a fright.
I wasn’t expecting anyone. It was only 18 hours after Chloe died.

We’d been on the road since 3 a.m. to pick up our other daughter. Jason’s family was in the living room. We were flip-flopping between rehashing Chloe’s last moments, scrolling through social media for clues like where her passenger’s car had been left (ummm… it turned up at the liquor store), and sitting silently, staring out the window.

I opened the door wondering who could have the balls to bring condolences in person so soon — or maybe it was a salesperson I could shock into fleeing.
I was already looking for an outlet for my shock in the form of socially unacceptable words.

Telling strangers “my kid just died” would become a way I protected my peace while reaching out for condolence energy.

The banana boxes of groceries had already started to pile up on the front steps before I even opened the door.

The guy handed me a slip of paper to confirm the delivery, and I must have looked stricken.
He had the wrong address, surely.
My shock probably came off as rude.

Then, glancing down, I recognized the fixings of a post-funeral home reception.

Paper plates. Coffee. Cups. Plastic cutlery.

Napkins. Tea. Giant frozen lasagnas.

Lady, this was a true gift.

Dish soap. Sponges. Garbage bags.

I remember thinking, I won’t have to go to Costco for a year.

I felt held.

Thank God for you, woman, because going in public instantly became excruciating —
like walking into a salty sea with hundreds of scratched-open mosquito bites.

You are the best.

Love,
Tanja

P.S.
Last month I took a deep breath and used up the last of the blue Dawn dish soap.
That smell has snuggled me at the sink for two and a half years.
The box of garbage bags recently spit out its last white, crinkled soldier.

They’ll probably be using those paper plates for my own funeral. I’d have to be dead for paper plates to be used at my house.

Cheers, girl.

The money was like kindling 
building toward that last fiery day, 
crisp logs
in the shape of oversized
bottles of rose

For years I tried to start a conversation with my husband regarding my motherly worry about would happen when our child reached 18 years old and was delivered fistfulls of cash.

Upon reaching legal adulthood, our girl was entitled to a government-held account that had been invested since her bio mother died when she was 6 years old. At 18 she received a fat five figures.

I grew up with investment-wise parents and my natural impulse was that we would guide her to how best to continue growing her account. My dear husband had a very weird point of view: it’s none of our business.

Pardon?

I thought back to my own self at 18 years old reading the stock prices to my dad as he plugged them into a tracking chart. I saw that our kid had no interest in finance. It followed then that she would want us to tell her what to do with it. Not be bossed around, but made to feel as though she was the one making the smart choices while actually only parroting what we had seeded for years. That sounded like care to me.

As the date approached for Chloe to receive her ‘inheritance’, Jason backed off entirely. He didn’t want to be prescriptive. Perhaps because he knew it created resistance. I get it. It often is that way with teens. But myself, I leaned in. My thinking: the only way money will care for you is if you care for it. I hoped she would hear the clear guidance and simply choose it as a lane of least resistance. He didn’t want ot be the bad guy. He felt as though he were her only ally and the way to maintain that relationship was to give freedom. Together, we offered our best.

I requested a meeting, it was miraculously accepted, and I delicately presented options and opportunities. I inquired after priorities and plans. I spoke in gentle suggestions: perhaps take this much and invest it for the long term, maybe set aside this much for school and then go mad on a sunny vacation with your friends with the rest. I even supported jumping on the day trading her ‘friend’ was doing.

We came to a simple plan that she easily agreed to. A literal no-brainer. I wrote the three numbers on the whiteboard, took a picture, and that was it. I used up all my influence points for the year in that one conversation. I arranged a meeting for her with an investment partner. I believe she took that meeting. Her job was to sign some paperwork.

Those investments didn’t happen. I followed up three times. She mumbled something in my general direction the first two times. The last ask was outright ignored.

I worried by myself, I worried with friends, and worried with my dear husband. He told me again to back off. It was her responsibility now. One friend was brave enough to let her face express the horror of letting a child make such big financial decisions. I’m truly grateful to have had that momentary ally.

But I gave up and let go. The money was hers now. I resolved to make room for natural consequences. I had to. My focus was on how to live in the same house with someone who was breaking house rules but had the means to get the hell out. It was extremely tense. Finally, a year after receiving her money, she found a place of her own.

A year later

In a tiny office at our local bank branch the representative insisted that to print our dead child’s bank records we would have to pay a per-page fee.

He had just heard that our daughter had died in a flaming car crash the week prior.

This guy wanted to collect $21 for paper and ink.

We just wanted to cast a forensic eye on what happened to create a -$600 balance. A bank balance they wanted us to pay on behalf of an adult who no longer lived with us.

It was an interesting over reach on both our parts. Both parties trying to be somewhat human but who kept falling back toward arbitrary lines we would not cross.
We will show you her records but not print them.
She was our child when we wanted the records.
You should be paying the bank bank for your child’s missteps.
She was her own adult self when it came time to pay her debts.

We will invade our child’s privacy and expect you to kindly print that shit for free.

I’ve heard Jason raise his voice maybe three times in 16 years. I’m glad I wasn’t in that tiny room. The walls must have vibrated.

We did indeed get a print out of her last year of bank transactions. But I was the only one that could really look at them.

Turns out Chloe didn’t touch that money for a full 6 months after receiving it.

She did go on a trip with her friends. While I’m glad she enjoyed some of her money, I have a deep gut feeling that she was assaulted on that trip. She was routinely getting blackout drunk and likely doing whatever drug was put in front of her. Photos show the common recklessness of a young person in Mexico. What I saw was that something shifted after that trip. That’s when the spending flood gates opened.

She finally looked for a place to live that didn’t hinder the amount of weed she could smoke or booze she could drink. She found a place on the oppostire end of town from her job. She ‘moved out’ but dragged her heels. This girl had the keys the her tiny bedroom in a shared house for weeks before I finally had enough and tied her mattress to the roof of my car. I did us both the favour of completing the move. Afterwards, I weeped over a Big Mac in my car. Relief and sadness make for good gluttony.

I was proud of her though. She finally made a move she had wanted for so long. Because it was totally across town from her job she bought a car. By her report, the price went down three times because the sellers loved helping out a first time car owner.

Lies.

Let the record show she was either very generous or had a lot of people running errands for her. She sent money to friends. A full 50% of the transactions were money transfers. My guess is the usual mileaux of splitting pizzas coupled with weed runs to the Reserve.

The rest was booze, drugs and Uber Eats. All the while telling us about the raises she was getting. How little rent she paid.

Lies.

If I may say, that bank account delivered nothing but empty calories — a brief sugar high, then a crash.

But she was about to have a reckoning.

When she hit -$600 in her account she got fucked up and died in a car crash. That’s not a coincidence. That’s desperation. Panic.

Why am I making this public? It’s very dirty laundry.

I want you to know that hurt-souls-in-human-suits can make terrible decisions.

They are not a direct reflection of you. Even if you are their blood parent.

Many children’s decisions are beyond parental influence. Maybe your kid has made some of the same choices.

I tend to think that in this case she had the privilege of having two parents with very different approaches to the delivery of a large sum of money. She got to choose her actions with all that she had inside her.

Ultimately, the money was kindling; it fed a blaze that remade our family. Time has brought some rain.

Two and half years later

I’m currently blowing my own wad.

I saved up like a mofo ‘adult’ and executed on the vision that is my dream trip to Australia. Planned long before this explosion.

I’m trying on the label of ‘retired’.

Like, retired from parenting.

Even though our other daughter is with me for this first leg of the trip. (Lucky her - she’s getting to witness in real time the UN MOM ING.) On the road, I practice a brittle kind of mercy: learning how to let both of us be hungry. Our roles are shifting. It’s a bit gnarly dude.

May we be graceful in this beautiful release.

Smells.

Like apple juice.

Cold-from-the-fridge-apple-juice-in-a-tetra-pack

smells different from

warm-in-a-plastic-cup-on-a-picnic-table apple juice.

Which smells different from

apple juice that is made by running granny smiths through the juicer.

There’s the smell of apples that I raked up at the edge of the vegetable patch on the farm where I grew up, near the drum where we burned paper instead of taking it to the dump. The thin smell of ash mixed with bruised apples, mostly mushy and brown from releasing too early — rotten and filled with drunken wasps.

I imagine I’ll one day be bed bound, running through my catalogue of scents to pass the time.

Just now I got the stiff-hotel-sheets smell, the 10am-bleach-under-the-door smell of rooms being cleaned around mine.

How can these far away smells even travel to my nostrils?

Perimenopause, I say.

Born that way, I say.

How many molecules does it take to register a smell in my nose? Probably two.

It’s very likely I am an alien.

The older kids on my school bus, also being driven through a foggy morning in the Holland Marsh loudly wondered more than once what planet I was from.

Their bullying hardly registered. I was wholly present to something else. My nose filled with the dark earth and sluggish, muddy canals. The coffee breath of the bus driver made its way back to me as I watched Mexican workers pick up carrots in the gloom. The earth smelled tired. Crates of orange lined the fields and left their subtle rot in each seat of the bus.

If I went blind I would navigate by scent.

I know intimately the wet cardboard smell of recycled paper napkins as I walk into Starbucks. The burned-then-ground coffee an imposing canvas for the myriad other scents in a chain food establishment1. The injection-moulded plastic lids on ceramic travel mugs each have a scent. To me, it’s no surprise that each batch number has a distinct smell.

I can smell the tamale the maid in the hall had last night, microwaved during a final wipe-down of her home kitchen. A heated tamale - exactly 24 seconds - is the temperature that gives her comfort. Most days, it is similar enough to the freshly made ones her long-dead mother used to serve.

Esther writes Losing My Son To Suicide; Hope Healing and Joy (HH & J)

Her words are so heart felt. Her pain so at the surface. I appreciate her honesty and envy her gentleness.

I’m honoured that she thought of me for this award.

The Sunshine Blogger Award is a way for bloggers to recognize each other’s work — especially those considered creative, positive, and inspirational.

I wouldn’t say I’m all that positive considering my last post but I am grateful to be part of this community. My writing might be hard to look at directly, but my aim is always to make the secret corners of your heart feel a little less lonely.

Below, I’ll answer (most) of the questions I was given, then pass the torch to a handful of fellow writers whose work has left a mark on me.

Sunshine Blogger Award Q&A

What do you write about?
I write about grief, motherhood, memory, and the parts of life most people don’t want to talk about out loud. After my daughter died, I didn’t write for years. Now, writing has become a way to name what felt unspeakable. I’m tender, tough, and still bleeding.

Why?
Because silence can be comfortable but when you get bored of that a bit of crunchy truth can provide the bite you’re looking for. Writing helps me pull the juice out of an over ripe lime. I really like food metaphors and this is where they collect. If put language to the pain, maybe someone else will feel a little less crazy in their own.

What’s something you believe deeply, even if it’s unpopular?
You take in a bit of each person you have sex with and it stays with you forever.

What do you long for right now?
Cut up fruit served to me. Watermelon would be best. With feta and basil and mint and balsamic and… yes olives.

What’s a small ritual that keeps you grounded?
Dog walk!

When do you feel most alive?
Striking out on a new adventure!

What’s a truth you’re still learning to live with?
The rights and wrongs of parenting are so much more blurry than I had imagined.

What do you want to be remembered for?
That I made a place for art in this wacky world.

Who are you when you’re not creating or working?
Beyond my writing, I’m a photographer, a gardener, and a traveler. I find joy in cooking for people I love, getting dirt under my fingernails, and chasing light. I love to make Beauty.

What was your favorite hobby as a child?
Tea parties with imaginary friends and building a tree house.

Where is the most exotic place you’ve ever travelled to?
Probably Kenya. Safari for Christmas!

Where is a place you hope to travel to?
New Zealand. Will I make it there this year on my bucket list trip to Australia??

If you could have a conversation with anyone, alive or dead, who would it be?
Leonard Cohen. But we probably wouldn’t be doing much talking.

Who is your favorite writer?
Barbara Kingsolver and Elizabeth Gilbert and Ann Pachett are my tops!

My Sunshine Blogger Award Nominees

These are the heartfelt Substacks I nominate for the Sunshine Blogger Award. Their words have stopped me, soothed me, or split me wide open in the best way.

1. Isabelle - breathe yourself home

2. Lila - horizontal with lila

3. Jason - man down (ok so this is my husband but he’s got his own flavour)

4. Deb - smitten kitchen

5. kd - obsessively yours

6. mary ann - little bird poet

7. anna - creative fuel

8. tara - slowdown farmstead

Ok, that’s enough for now.

Here’s the questions I’ll ask of my nominees:

What’s the smallest, most ordinary thing that feels like medicine to you right now

What role does beauty play in your life?

What are you still searching for, name it imperfectly here:

What’s a belief you used to hold tightly that has since fallen apart?

Are you calling this blogging?

No pressure folks. I didn’t think I’d see chain mail at 47 either.

Love, Tanja

I know that hate is a strong word to give to a young person to use, even in a story. They generally don’t have enough life experience to warrant hate. Anger, sure. But hate? That’s a word reserved for the vengeful-warrior-undoing-generational-curses type of tale.

But Chloe was a warrior of sorts.

A gorgeous creature plagued by generations of painful baggage, fighting for her very existence.

When telling the story of a hurt little girl who ended up dead by way of self destruction, it’s more comfortable to err on the side of tenderness. It’s the kind thing to do. Holding a traumatized young person fully accountable, for hate or anything else, is not on trend. These days, we seek to understand, then empathise, with that underweight, pale and weak maiden. The tendency then, is to leave it at that. Poor girl.

Chloe looked weak. She succumbed to addictions. Her mind was tortured. She barely ate. She drank wine for breakfast. It showed up in her body as physical and mental illness. And yet… hate takes strength.

This kid was resourceful. This kid was bold. She used what she could grasp. Chloe stole my entire wallet. Not just a $20 once in a while. She took the whole damn thing.

This kid was subtle. This kid was funny. Chloe made a TikTok that mentioned a pink vibrator that could only be mine. It would have been funny but it meant she was going through my things.

But these aren’t the things that told me she hated me. These were angry teenager things. Common enough behaviours that said nothing if recounted as isolated incidents.

What told me she hated me was not screaming matches or violence. It was the look in her eyes at Christmas. The apathy at any dinner. It was in her inability to receive anything I had to give. Whether it was a thoughtful gift, a clear ask, or an umbrella on a rainy day, she was having none of it.

Her hate showed up as total shut down at my attempts to give her a voice in the household with what quickly became a total joke: a.k.a. ‘family meetings’. It showed up as total silence when I gifted her a prompted journal for her 18th birthday. I had taken years to fill in the memories and emotions and let her into my world. I hoped she would see she is part of my story. I don’t know if we found that journal amidst her things. I do know that nearly every gift I ever gave her disappeared into thin air.

I hear your inside voice.

“You’re just hurt.”

“Maybe gifts weren’t her love language.”

Give me a fucking break. I said all those things to myself too.

Chloe was extremely charming — her friends had no reason not to believe her stories. Many months after her funeral, her closest friend recounted an intense story. One really drove home the special kind of hate she had for me. As far as her friends knew, including all those witnessing me at her funeral, I had used her dad’s drinking as a way to get her sent to a foster home where the first family was nice but the second family repeatedly raped her.

Step-monster indeed. That did not happen.

After hearing that one even my husband said, ‘She sure hated you.’ I suspect he’s intentionally forgotten all the other tales he heard.

This kid was creative. The lies she told were out of this world.

One reason Chloe hated me was because she couldn’t trick me. She spun a fantastic yarn and presented well but I saw something others didn’t. I also held her accountable for her lies. No one else could do that. Even my brilliant husband blindly believed.

You might be thinking ‘that’s a classic trauma response’. Yes, you are right. Maybe you want to stick up for her again. Go ahead. I’ve said it myself: she was a pretty little liar doing some coping mechanism shit because her bio mum took her own life. It’s not her fault.

But maybe, just maybe, we let her have some agency.

I want to acknowledge and validate her hate here.
She felt it. Let her have it. This was her truth.

Explaining away her behaviours as trauma responses doesn’t erase their impact. She nearly killed four other people the night she crashed her car. Uninsured. That one tiny detail alone has a huge impact on the lives of those who survived her manic moment.

Feeling hated takes time to sink in. I couldn’t give it that title until the last few years of her life. When I finally admitted to myself that my love wasn’t working for our relationship, I pulled back. It is really hard to believe such a young person could feel such deep hate toward the mother she has had since she was six. Especially a good mother. An average mother doesn’t deserve that hate either. A slightly crappy mom probably shouldn’t get hate either. Granted, I was her ‘step-mother’ but we never called it that. I was a good mom. HER mom.

It would be complete hubris to assume her hate was solely because of things I did or didn’t do. That wouldn’t allow for any of her own soul work to be part of the picture. What I can tell you is that I was consciously working at being a mom that noticed the needs of her children. Perhaps I asked too much. Perhaps too little. I know I treated this job of being Chloe’s only living mother as my utmost priority. I have indeed teetered on the edge of thinking her state of mind was my fault. Being so responsible for her care, how could I not? Don’t parents create their kids? In what ways? Are you sure?

I gave her all the fertile ground upon which she could feel comfortable: fresh sheets, good food, driving her instead of making her take a bicycle. Cheerleading and summer camp. She had privacy, a clean home, allowance, responsibility, a conscious Waldorf school community and people holding her accountable. She had a fun dad who was interested in her life. A mother she could take for granted and who would be there with banana bread (extra chocolate chips, no nuts). Chloe had all the ingredients for moving toward a fulfilling life.

And yet…

She floundered. She hated.

I underestimated the trauma of losing her mom to suicide.

In the end, even with all the coping, her path wasn’t to survive her ghosts.

She had swallowed them whole.

Here’s where it gets weird folks.

Three weeks before Chloe died, three dark figures appeared at the foot of my bed.

Remarkably, I knew what to do. Over the years I have gained confidence in interacting with things that appear at the foot of one’s bed. I’ve been mentored and am not scared. These beings were unique though.

The dark shadows stood shoulder to shoulder and wanted nothing from me — I asked.

They weren’t dark as in evil. They weren’t there for good either.

They were wholly neutral.

I hadn’t had this experience before. Usually there would be a message for me or a soul’s restlessness looking for something from me. That wasn’t the case here.

They just stood staring without judgement.

I waited. Nothing came.

So I told them to leave. I had taken in enough of their ‘beingness’, let’s say.

I didn’t share about these Nothing Beings with anyone as there was nothing to say.

But once Chloe died they came again. Just not to visit me.

Of course Chloe had a tender side. She wasn’t a living devil.

If she had felt anything other than hate for me it would have been too much vulnerability for her soul to bear. Letting me in would have cracked her open and she wasn’t here for that. She always refused the offer of therapy but her hurt needed to go somewhere. I thought that somewhere was me. It now looks like she had another destination in mind.

That freezing winter night that Chloe died I told some soul sisters within the hour. Slightly older than me and with far more meditative hours logged, these women offered to usher Chloe’s violently ejected soul toward a peaceful light.

In shock, all I could say was, ‘Yes, do that please.’

Weeks later, in a place to hear about how that night landed for them, my women told me about what they saw as they sat quietly as guides for Chloe’s soul: first an owl came and sat on their outdoor fountain. We live in the heart of a city folks. How could this be? For half an hour it drank and watched. Then, they experienced three dark beings seemingly trapped in this realm finally pulled to freedom by an unlikely Healer. Chloe was taking her tortured Motherline home — back from whence they came.

Chloe’s hate had a purpose. In her life and after her death.

I see that hate has a place. Not just as the extreme opposite of love but as it’s own powerful transformer.

It might culminate in a fiery car accident. It can maul you with lawsuits. It will punctuate sentences with ugly, sobbing screams.

Hate is also discernment in action.

It’s a transformative fire.

Hate has big work to do.

Perhaps it can also suddenly transform into an act of love. I like to think that Chloe helped end a timeline of maternal pain. It seems to me that she was always meant to bring the ghosts home.

Privacy.

The kind you afford your kids in their rooms as they’re growing up.

I was always adamant: I would never read a diary or a journal. I was clear with my kids that I respected their privacy. I would have died if someone read my struggling-mom scribbles where I blew off steam, so I extended the same respect to them.

I’m from the generation that looks away when someone types in their password.

Kids keep private things. Us GenX’ers did too—love notes and erotica. Cheap vibrators from Chinatown. The usual.

I was however super fucking clear about my boundaries: no vape shit or drugs belonged in their rooms. Not in our home.

And we’re not dumb.

Kids experiment. But we were not going to be the permissive party house. Go try things, sure. Just don’t bring them home.

I wanted our house to be a haven. A soft landing place. The kind of home where you could watch cartoons in your pyjamas, blankie in hand—even at 15. Even at 28.

But in a lot of ways, I did a terrible job creating that kind of space for Chloe. Today, I tend to believe that no amount of ‘correct’ support would have been enough.

[Yes, my daughter’s name was Chloe. She died 2.5 years ago in a car accident of her own making. As part of this week’s post-mortem to-do’s, I inquired about burying her ashes with her bio-mum. Turns out it's cheaper on weekdays.]

As parents, my husband Jason and I had average expectations: bedrooms didn’t need to be pristine, but if my nose could smell your dirty sheets or the door wouldn’t open at least halfway due to Clothes Mountain, it was time to clean up. Before trips or summer camp? Time to tidy. Coming home to a clean room is nice. A little ritual of care. I hoped it was a routine our girls could carry into adulthood.

I liked to change their bedding if they went away so they could come home to fresh sheets. That whole Acts of Service thing. It was how I showed love. I wanted Chloe and her sister to feel taken care of. It was my job. I took it seriously.

Not unreasonably, I also wanted to be able to breathe in my own hallway.

As teenage friction increased, Chloe did a shittier and shittier job of keeping up with basic requests. Her non-effort was a blatent fuck you. Yup - I took it personally most of the time. Therapists and friends say not to. But there was something personal. She rejected me everyday. Christmas presents lost or sold, declined shopping trips, declined baked goods, giving the finger during the family holiday portrait for grandma.

Of course she also busted out the dreaded: ‘You’re not my mother!’

I’ll be honest - I 100% was prepared for that day. However, my unplanned response was that I actually laughed in her face.

I roared: ‘Guess what girl. I AM your mother.’

My intention was actually to make her feel secure. To help heal the abandonment she felt from her birth mom. I wanted her to know I would never give up and stop being her mom.

When faced with her lack of care for the rules or any sort of cleaning standard I was absolutely condescending. Because I felt justified in my bafflement - I asked so little. So, so little. How could she not even know how to do the minimum?

Eventually, I started to wonder if maybe her traumatized brain—early parental separation, bio-mum’s suicide—literally couldn't process simple requests. So I changed my tactics. I’d break the task down. I’d do it with her. She hated that. She really hated that. That was condescending too.

I had so many reasons not to trust her so one day, in a classic pre-menstrual cleaning spiral, I peeked under her bed.

Garbage. Everywhere. Candy wrappers. Food wrappers. I’d already heard her throwing up after meals—disordered eating confirmed.

I asked her to clean it. She didn’t.

Jason couldn’t ask her. Just couldn’t be stern at all.

He couldn’t ask anything of her that might make her feel criticized. She’d lost her mum. She didn’t have a great relationship with me. How could he make her feel even more isolated?

So he didn’t. Over and over again.

Oh there were times he insisted and addressed her behaviours. But when it got close to the final option of asking her to leave the home and live elsewhere, he froze. He simply couldn’t kick his baby out of the nest. Even though she was shitting all over it.

I was the one who confronted her at the top of the stairs for meeting a guy outside our open bedroom window at midnight to smoke a joint. Like, girl—I can see you. And I can smell you from a mile away.

I was the only one who called her on her lies.

And so we continued: Daddy as the good guy. Mommy as the hard-ass.

Wicked stepmother much?

One day, a rainbow wool mitten—just one of a pair that belonged to her bio-mum—was sticking out from under her bed. I snatched it up to put it away. Put it away because I didn’t want her to lose her mum’s things and put it away because mitts had a home in the Hat & Mitt bin.

(Uh oh. Here we go.)

Inside was a cutting kit. Sharp things. Tissue. All the signs of self-harm.

This is the part where, in a movie, I’d gently confront her and ask if she was okay.

But no. I knew she wasn’t okay. I knew it a thousand different ways.

Behind that mitten were the little rubber vape pen lids, the chargers, then a box full of oozing vape goop. Then there were ashes in the windowsill. The remnants of joints falling out of old purses. Then empty booze bottles I could see from the hallway.

MDMA in a little baggie stashed in a sock.

I never asked her about the mitten.

Other signs that she wasn’t coping kept coming: her school called about her treatment of a teacher or a rule she’d broken. The number of days she was sick and shaky. How much weight she lost. How she would only pick at her food. How she stole my wallet full of cash. Like the whole wallet and not just $20 that probably would have gone unnoticed.

There was the time she ran away in a t-shirt in the middle of winter and I called the police for advice. Or the time the police came to the door and said some guy at a bar had reported her missing and no one could find her. Or how she drove her out-of-alignment tires until they were bald and a tow truck driver took pity on her and brought her home for free.

This was meant to be about privacy and now I’m writing about every sad sign of suffering she endured.

But I also endured it.

I’m going to draw a line in the sand and say I afforded her all the privacy she was entitled to.

I was the worried mom of kid with complex trauma. It’s not straight-forward. There’s minute emotional detail that is difficult to get across in words.

Chloe didn’t want help from me. She didn’t want it from a therapist. She convinced her dad she was fine.

I had been a teenage girl and I saw all the warning signs. I saw things Jason didn’t. He thought I was overreacting. He compared his own adolescence to hers and concluded that she was fine.

So, how many times can a parent say: ‘You can’t vape in your room.” Or “If you want to vape in your room you have to move out.”

I write this to make clear that my grief around Chloe started long before she died. I grieved for her unsoothable pain. For the love she couldn’t receive. For how helpless I felt. I grieved for the relationship I thought we’d have - shopping trips and the family holiday meals prepared side by side.

For the last years of her life, I had to slowly stop trying to be her mother.

One of the last hugs I remember giving Chloe happened 6 months before she died. We were in the tiny room she had rented across town. She’d had the keys for weeks but hadn’t moved in. She’d wanted out for years, the ultimate privacy, and was now dragging her heels.

So on a random Wednesday I strapped her mattress to the roof of my car. “Tonight’s the night,” I said calmly and kindly. I created the charade that I was doing her a favour. The idea was to avoid the scenario where we were ‘kicking her out’. I needed her and the tension in our house to just move out.

After we unloaded her things, I wanted to make her bed for her. Just like my mum did for me at university drop-off. Her bedding was stuffed in a garbage bag so I started to open it and was hit with the smell of dirty bodies. Sheets that hadn’t been changed in eons.

Maybe I made a face. Maybe I kept it together. I’m no longer sure.

What I do remember is that I thought I was going to give her a fresh bed as a sweet send off.

Chloe refused my offer of a made bed.

All that was left to do was shrug. Okay then. Bye.

I gave her a hug.

“I’m so glad you are finally getting what you want.” I said. That was sincere.

Leaving her there like that was not what I wanted for her. Nevertheless, I left her with her choices, mattress bare.

In the car, I cried with relief. I cried for every time I’d wished her gone. I cried for all my good intentions that never landed. I cried because part of me knew this move would intensify the risky behaviours that were propping up her days. I actually had hope that we could forge a new path where she came for Sunday dinner and told us about her days.

I left her new apartment quickly. I drove straight to McDonald’s and ordered a Big Mac meal at 9 p.m. I sat in a thrift store parking lot and fed the pain. Then I shopped the thrift store, Diet Coke in hand, until they kicked me out. I never had caffeine at night. And greasy food? Also never.

Chloe’s life imploded six months later.

I’m not asking you to tell me I did a good job.

I did the best I could with what I had. I wanted the best for her.

And maybe truly it wasn’t my job.

A soul’s work in this realm is a mystery. Only her ghost knows what she needed to do in this world.

Isn’t that just the ultimate privacy.

Obviously, you wont feel like having sex after your kid dies.

Fucking is for sure out. (Oh look another ‘F’!)

I’ve heard some people still make love. They just cry why they’re doing it.

Personally, I haven’t had to claim I have a headache because frankly sexy time it’s the furthest thing from our minds.

If you’ve recently lost a child, you’re also likely entering a masterbatory draught of indeterminate length. In any other circumstance I’d prescribe it as a balm for all discomforts. Not this one.

Maybe, on the off chance funerals turn you on and you are the ‘re-affirming life’ kind, then by all means, get busy. All coping is acceptable in my eyes to attend this kind of loss. For a time anyway.

That’s deep enough on this topic. My mother in law has likely found her way here.

***

What about FUN after your kid dies?

Surprise! That dies too guys. Obvioulsy.

And if you start healing and think you’re headed back to who you used to be - I’m so sorry. You’ll never be that person again. Did you scream going down waterslides? Did you have giggle fits at Chris Farley movies? Or fart jokes? Here’s your chance to recreate what you think is funny. You literally have a blank slate.

Apparently healing from child loss trauma doesn’t mean going back to the fun person you were. So you get to grieve your old self too. If there’s any room for that.

Healing means being able to feel joy again. You heal to make room for joy, I’m told.

Well - newsflash, after your kid dies you’ll be learning Joy from scratch. It took me two years to laugh. How about you?

Let’s be real I wasn’t a ‘fun’ person to begin with (that was my husband’s job) so grasping for it now has been an indicator of my readiness to move outside of this grief fog. Yay me.

What I’ve called FUN lately:

• Eating take out salads parked by a dumpster. It’s our jokey date night now.

• Hiking the hardest trail I’ve done in my life - it was straight up a mountain for 3 hours. Using my body to exhaustion is fun for some reason. The opposite of death is excruciating and exhilarating uber-physical life I guess.

• Exploring while on business trips. Novelty somehow feels especially good now. I suppose that means my capacity has grown and I have healed a great deal. From a year ago, not having capacity to go grocery shopping (too overwhelming) to now trying new things, I feel so much more human. I’m right now sitting in a sweet cafe and mercantile (read: gift shop) in a fishing village on the edge of Canada. Outside the window is a small group of guys doing regular maintenance on their lobster traps. Their physiques are all the same. Breakfast was at a convenience store. This was recommended by ‘George’ the local lobster refrigeration expert who sits in a folding chair outside my accommodations smoking cigarettes while looking dapper in his neat, trim beard and Tilley hat. I was the only one at the High Tide Convenience not wearing industrial rubber boots.

***

Friendships change when your kid dies. This probably deserves it’s own series of posts but emotionally I can only dip my toe in at this point.

I haven’t heard an instance yet where the Friends sphere wasn’t affected by a child’s death.

For me, the least likely characters stepped up. The old standbys faded into the mist. I spent countless hours dissecting that perceived abandonment in therapy but what I’m left with is better: people who don’t mind getting messy and people who make time for me.

I’ve learned how to be a much better friend. I can be honest with the energy I’m picking up and putting down. I have a new clarity for what works friends-wise. I also have zero tolerance for potential friend matches that don’t feel nourishing both ways.

It’s been worth the tears, folks.

New friends come without the history of knowing my dead daughter. There’s a relief in that. I get to paint a picture of her. It’s actually a huge responsibility to craft that narrative because her last years were so intense. It’s easy to focus on the loud memories. Luckily the quiet ones pop up in my Facebook memories.

All that said, my hubby is absolutely my best friend. He is the easiest company and we are somehow closer than ever before. Growing together is our M.O. but we weren’t expecting to weather such a storm in exchange for the deepening of our relationship.

***

There’s a fourth ‘F’ thing that changed. I’ve heard it’s not only me. I know I’ve said it before.

It’s FOOD.

I simply can’t like eating anymore. I don’t like cooking and I LOVED cooking. I can’t like sugary things, I can’t like salty things, I can’t like fancy restaurants at $300 a plate (I’ve tried). I couldn’t even pretend like the pathetic fried rice I made last week.
I’ve lost my love for food.

I’m told it comes back. Maybe there is a benefit to putting food love aside for a while.

I don’t know what it is yet but I can tell you it’s not reflected in my waistline.

***
Change is the only constant so this human is learning to ride the waves.

Be the passenger. Surrender.

Let’s see what the next tide brings in.

It’s kind of a huge burn, since I’ve always been an enjoyer of food. No eating guilt. Everything in moderation. No major intolerances. I’ve cried in restaurants out of sheer joy— a wonder that something could be that lovingly, skillfully prepared.

I used to love cooking elaborate meals. Productions that spanned three full days.
I hosted Friendsgiving.

I’ve told my therapist no less than fourteen times that I am a chef.

Was a chef.

I loved food.

For something to do in her later years my grandmother would take me to Swiss Chalet and beam as I ate with gusto. We had a good food history together. When I was 7 she opened a can of mushrooms, placed it in front of me (no bowl), and smiled as I devoured the grey buttons straight from the tin. The joy of a fork-speared grey button mushroom dripping with thick tin water. My grandfather was a baker by trade and made me strawberry cheesecake for my birthday. My mother always made our family favourites and sometimes pushed a new recipe from the Canadian cookbook classic, Looney Spoons. So reliable. My father grew the vegetables.

Food was comfort. Food was home.

So, in turn, my own kids had a creative, healthy, sit down dinner nearly every night.

For the past 15 years, friends and family preferred my kitchen-ing to going out. I signed up for every school potluck with a gold-star dish. My cookbook collection is extensive—spilling off shelves, littering the floor, post-it flags poking out like antennae. I used to curl up with one of these hardcover food-love stories on Sunday mornings.

Lord, I even had a mommy blog. There I documented the school lunches, the roast chickens devoured at the kitchen island, the farm-stand peaches eaten over the sink. I taught my kids that food could be joy. Could be connection. To farmers. To each other.

I sourced illegal raw milk — quietly picking up bottles at dusk in a carefully orchestrated dairy supply ring. I breaded my own chicken strips.

So yes, you could easily say I was passionate about food.

I’m still contemplating that root-vegetable forearm tattoo.

***

This idyllic home restaurant started to fall apart when my girls hit high school.

Turns out, kids don’t necessarily want to eat like you - for more reasons that just teenage spite.

When you open your mama wing and hustle them inside after their mother dies, they don’t automatically start craving your wholesome, homemade fare. I’m convinced that food relationships start earlier than memory but I believed that my love could rewire them. That if I just kept offering honest, whole food made with care, they’d come to love it like I did.

They didn’t. The odds were not in their favour.

Their bio mom struggled with disordered eating her whole life. Their dad’s family eats for fuel, out of obligation.

On top of that, pandemic isolation led to TikTok binges and ultimately ‘pro-ana’ content creeped into our home behind closed doors. Diet culture bombarded these fragile minds and bodies. One kid picked at her plate. One kid was down to eating only 10 foods. Seven of them were roasted vegetables.

I thought I had set us up with a deeply appreciative family food culture over the last 15 years. It was how I showed my love.

I fed people.

I’m not sure how to accurately describe what family meals became. Scattered, tense, watchful, short.

I confused their lack of food love with personal rejection. It was my purest offering and they didn’t want it.

Maybe you’re born with an internal menu. No farm-to-table, Brady Bunch, new-to-you mama is going to rewrite that.

I just didn’t think I’d succumb too.

***

When my daughter died at nineteen, she was very thin.

She was living on her own and wasn’t eating much. Turns out she was drinking to get through the day. Half a bottle of rosé was found on the floor by the passenger seat of her mangled car.

She caused the accident and wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. She severely injured her passenger. The family in the other vehicle are forever changed. It’s a miracle anyone survived.

People often assume she killed herself when I speak about it.

It looked like an accident but a more intentional choice wasn’t far off. Her situation had become dire. The lies were catching up. She was following in her bio-mum’s footsteps and a diagnosis of a personality disorder was on the horizon.

It took four months to receive the full pathology report. All I wanted to know was her blood alcohol and cannabis levels. As if knowing how fucked up she was would change something about the uncomfortable thoughts I had about her actions.

***

The day the pathology report it arrived, I’d driven out to a strawberry field to enact an annual ritual: pick up a flat of berries still warm from the sun, eat them in the car on the way home, windows down, wind in my hair. A small-J joy. At that point, I would take any sunshine I could get. It has been a long winter.

I don’t even really like strawberries.

Red jewels purchased I got back into the car, windshield pointed toward the setting sun. I checked my email before starting the engine. The report was in.

I paused. Was this where I wanted to read it? Dusty parking lot, garden centre-turned-strawberry field? Where would be better?

I went ahead and clicked through. Read slowly, I told myself. I could stop at any time.

No one else was going to read it. My husband couldn’t. I felt someone had to witness. Experience the full impact. The entire human experience. Was that hubris? Strength? Duty? I have no idea.

After an awkward login to a public document, I was somehow surprised by the medical language: clavicle, C2 and C3, digit, laceration.

Fuck.

I didn’t know you could skip to the end for the summary.

I read every word.

Fuck. (Don’t do that, okay?)

No one should read their kid’s autopsy report.

And now I carry that. I chose it. I haven’t even dumped it on my therapist. I feel bad, even though she swears she can handle it.

You can’t unsee words.

I thought the details would integrate into the full story of her death. Instead, I’ve let time blur them out in a forgetting game.

Those strawberries didn’t taste as good as last year’s.

***

Almost everything in my world has gone back to “normal.” Except my friendships. Except my love of food.

It’s been two and a half years. The yogurt-container soups stopped showing up long ago. I fend for just myself in the kitchen 99% of the time. I don’t know how to love food again.

I bought pre-cooked chicken breast slices yesterday. Old me is quietly gagging. New me eats them with plain white rice and store-bought tzatziki. Limp romaine in a too-big plastic bowl.

For now, fed is best.

Once last week.

Grief scrambled my brain, rewired my body, and turned my closet into a coping mechanism.

Black wasn’t about fashion or mourning. It was armour.

I let go of nearly all my black clothing items a few weeks ago.

I collected them while I was deep in my grief for my daughter’s passing.

She made me want to wear black at the best of times, but since she died I had acquired a daily armour of black. I don’t even like black, really. This was not some outward signifier for the world to acknowledge my grief. It was an animal compulsion.

When the kids were elementary school age, we were a Waldorf family. In its ideal form that means wardrobe colours that fuel imagination and self-expression, topped with flowing silk scarves. It’s logo-free t-shirts, woolen base layers, and — for the toddlers — one-piece mud suits.

Chloe’s death at 19 years old triggered in me a two-year wardrobe malfunction.

I purchased crappy socks from Temu late at night, cocooned in bed.

And when I was out thrifting the pain away, I collected the colour black.

T-shirts, turtlenecks, crew neck sweatshirts, and Lululemon jackets (not even my style, much to my husband’s chagrin) were all purchased during my thrifting (coping) trips. Black leggings… I became an expert in those. Black was an easy uniform.

One day I noticed another woman about my age at the grocery store. She stood out because she was head to toe dressed in black. It’s not common where I live to see 45-year-old goth women.

Her energy was pushy. She stood too close while picking out fruit. Her gaze was aggressive to me. My grieving, sensitive self could barely handle being at the store at all and this woman irked me. You’d easily call her a witch.

Maybe she was trying to be approachable, but I took her as a woman with powers to unleash her own rage all over the pyramid of oranges.

Projecting much?

I was somewhat aware that I wore black to be unapproachable. But I also had a shit-ton of things to say. Ideally in a very yell-y voice. Black allowed me to be a quiet bully.

I wanted to scream things like:

“DON’T, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, LET YOUR KID CONVINCE YOU THEY DON’T NEED THERAPY AFTER THEIR BIO MUM DIES BY SUICIDE WHEN THEY WERE 6 YEARS OLD.”

Or:

“AUTOPSY REPORTS ARE NOT FOR PARENTS TO READ IN DETAIL! SKIP TO THE SUMMARY PARAGRAPH ON THE LAST PAGE IF YOU MUST.”

Black gave me the strength to do the difficult task of retrieving our daughter’s items from her wrecked car at the impound lot where it was waiting for the insurance folks to inspect it.
The same place that asked, “Why can’t your daughter come pick up her things?”

Ummmm, did you see the car?

Black made sure I could say “My daughter died” to any stranger who needed a redirect.

Black made me hope I’d get pulled over — just so I could push back.

I wanted the chance to get under the armour of some swaggering authority figure and let them know it was MY KID who died instantly in the fiery wreck caused by her driving drunk, stoned, and faster than I’ve ever driven, even on the Autobahn.

“Yes, that wreck that made the fire captain retire.”

Black allowed me to spew an inner monologue of pitiful anger masked as sadness.

It also allowed me to be a quiet bystander. Wearing black can make you invisible.

While in my armour, I felt a kinship with the countless homeless individuals lining our city’s streets. We try to make them invisible most days, don’t we?

I sent them love as I drove by in my new (safe) black SUV. It’s entirely possible I was one or two choices away from counting these folks as daily allies. The tragedies they had likely faced were part of the fuel of their addictions, weren’t they? How much crap would have to happen in my life to find me face down in the park?

As one year of grief turned into two, the fog of it shifted. I didn’t lean on black as much because I didn’t need to hide as much. I could finally have a full conversation with other humans. I bought a quirky hat.

And so, at the season’s turn, I let go of the bulk of my black clothing. Even the shirt of hers that I wore to yoga in those early days when all I could stand was a dark and peaceful mantra-filled room.

I just don’t need them anymore.

It protected me when I needed hiding.
Now, I’m letting it go.

- Tanja

P.S. If you’ve been nodding quietly while reading this, I see you.
Of course I kept one black t-shirt. Grief doesn’t care about clean endings.

If this reminded you of someone you love, maybe send it their way.
We don’t always talk about what grief makes us do/think/say — but maybe we should.

That’s the best way I know to describe what happens here.

Unpalatable is where I write about grief, motherhood, and the parts of life often left unspoken. Because they’re kind of gross.

I picked up writing again two years after losing my daughter—not to make sense of it all, because some things just don’t—but because naming the mess helps me live inside it. Here in this space, capturing sad beauty lives alongside finding hilarity. I hope you’ll get to read that too. My inside voice is strangely optimistic.

I’m writing from the edge of an empty nest, and the edge of menopause—both strange seasons where everything feels both over and just beginning. I’m also a photographer, which means I chase the details people often miss—the shadows, the cracks, the quiet gestures no one frames. That impulse shows up in my writing too.

You’ll find stories here that are raw and real. No fixing. No contrived, polished conclusions. Just the curious work of paying attention to what hurts, what lingers, what twists, and—occasionally—what shines.

This space is for the ones who don’t flinch at crusty, emotional blood and guts. Who crave honesty over performance and the strange beauty that sometimes shows up uninvited.

I’m not on a schedule. I write when the words come.

If something in here resonates, you’re welcome to hit reply and say so. I may not always respond quickly, but I read every word.

If you're not sure where to begin, here are a few posts to get you started:
👉 I smiled too much at my kid’s funeral
👉 Turns out grief looks good in harvest gold velvet
👉 My soul dog died

If this feels like the kind of personal essay you’ve been missing—one that might leave a bad taste in your mouth—you’re in the right place.

I’m glad you’re here.

—Tanja

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Turns out there is a lot to say once you start saying it.

Here’s a report from two years after my kid died in a car accident that she caused by driving drunk and high as a result of poor choices born from childhood trauma (suffered just as I arrived on the scene when she was 6 years old). I know that sounds so brutal but maybe bear with me.

[My husband writes about it differently here.]

***

My kid was a gorgeous and complex kid. She wanted everyone to have a good time at a busy party and took care of the anxious-in-a-corner kids. I’ve heard rumour that she could also be exceptionally cruel. I think she was a good sister.

Her bio-mum died by her own hand after spending years accumulating a sack full of psychiatric labels and their corresponding medications. Overall we now say in our home that Cindy suffered from emotional dysregulation born from all sorts of (capital T) Traumas and an unfavourable genetic inheritance. When she died I swooped in and sat the kids on my knee at her funeral. I wore green tights.

The CLARITY I’m reporting on, that has arrived with an awkward bump and grind, is this:

It is so much easier to say no to things that don’t light me up. Life is fricken short, man. I can say from here that my friends are better, my wardrobe is better, my work is better… I suffer no fools.

When your kid dies you are temporarily blinded. When the fog lifts (for me it has been in stages) you just might receive a new type of vision.

You might feel a new patience for those that have been through unexpected death.

You might see that your daily life doesn’t align with your actual values and you need to mine your depths to really understand what those are. What a gift!

And speaking of gifts, you might just get a HUGE bucket of GRATITUDE.

Here’s todays list:

• my husband brings me tea in bed every day

• I have space to garden. A feel-good obsession.

• noise cancelling headphones

• gut health

• new brunch places

• that Grade 9 typing class that was the most useful skill I learned in high school even though it seem pretty dumb at the time because I knew i’d never own a typewriter

• the way bubble water can replace beer

• devoted Golden Retrievers

May your blessings born of hardship come in pretty packages.

Peace and CLARITY to you.

I also now need bifocals.

So - whatever that is.