Nobody Tells You The Last Time They’ll Reach For Your Hand

On Grief, Granola, and the Country Our Children Deserve

I’m just now sitting down after a fantastically full Mother’s Day with the kids. The same kids the MAGA shidiot incel trolls routinely insist I’ve somehow had taken away from me despite the inconvenient for them reality that they are with me pretty much constantly.

We had a long late lunch, watched our Knicks sweep the Sixers, spent a stupid amount of money on pillows for my deck chairs, played a couple rounds of Mario Kart, and now here we are.

A couple of glasses of wine into my evening and I’m feeling a touch reflective. Ok, I’ve actually been ugly crying off and on for the last hour, but who’s counting.

Because somewhere in the middle of all of this, I kept catching myself just staring at them. Staring at my kids so intensely it almost felt intrusive, like I was trying to memorize them faster than time could carry them away from me.

My son standing in the kitchen at sixteen and a half years old, built suddenly out of elbows and appetite and disappearing groceries and empty gallon milk jugs, eating fistfuls of granola and blueberries straight out of the container while browning yet another pound of ground beef because apparently this child is preparing physically for either a growth spurt or hand-to-hand combat. There are never enough towels in this house anymore. Or cereal bowls. Or spoons. Never enough food. Never enough milk. I buy enough groceries to sustain what feels like a mid-sized hockey franchise and forty-seven minutes later he’s standing in front of the refrigerator again staring into it like a weary widower searching for answers.

And my daughter… my God, my daughter.

Half little girl, half young woman now in this strange, heartbreaking in-between space that I don’t think anyone adequately prepares you for. One minute she’s asking me to take her to Starbucks for a Pink Drink and the next she’s sitting cross-legged on the floor bedazzling absolutely everything within a five-mile radius like a tiny rhinestone crime boss while a couple of dolls still sit over in the corner of her room beside skincare products and Starbucks cups waiting patiently for childhood to decide whether it’s staying or leaving.

And I don’t want it to leave.

That’s the truth nobody really says out loud because we’re all supposed to pretend we’re handling this beautifully, gracefully, like emotionally stable women in pharmaceutical commercials walking through farmers markets in straw hats and linen.

Sometimes motherhood feels beautiful like that.

Sometimes it feels like grief with a carpool lane attached to it.

Because nobody tells you the exact day your child stops reaching for your hand automatically.

Nobody warns you.

There’s no ceremony for it. No final handshake. No little announcement from the universe letting you know that some small sacred ritual of parenthood is about to happen for the last time.

One day they’re grabbing your fingers in parking lots and crossing streets and climbing stairs and tugging you through crowds and airport terminals and the contact is so constant, so instinctive, so woven into daily life you barely even consciously register it anymore.

And then one day it stops.

That’s it.

It just… stops.

And you don’t even realize it’s over until weeks later maybe, or months later, when you’re walking beside them somewhere and suddenly become aware that your hand is hanging there empty at your side like an unanswered question.

I wasn’t ready for that.

I’m still not.

Motherhood sometimes feels like standing at the edge of the ocean watching pieces of your own heart slowly learn how to swim away from you. That’s the assignment. Raise them to be brave enough and capable enough and whole enough to move farther and farther out into the world under their own power. Attachment and release. Attachment and release. Tiny hands wrapped around your fingers until one day your hand is empty at your side and you realize another small piece of them has drifted farther from shore. And even when that’s exactly what you wanted for them, there’s still an ache inside it.

The kind where your heart keeps quiet records of things your children themselves no longer even remember.

The weight of them asleep on your chest.

The little-kid cadence of “Mommy watch this.”

The way they used to crawl into your bed after bad dreams.

I still remember the exact physical feeling of my son asleep against me when he was little. I still remember my daughter climbing into my lap smelling like strawberry shampoo and sunscreen. Those memories remain embedded somewhere beneath my ribs alongside every fear and every prayer I’ve ever carried for them.

And maybe all of this hits me the way it does because I know exactly what it means to grow up aching for a mother while simultaneously trying to become one.

My son made me a mother.

My daughter forced me to reckon with the little girl inside me who spent years feeling like motherhood and gentleness and safety were things happening somewhere on the other side of thick glass.

I knew how to love my children immediately. My son taught me that instantly. The absolute animal force of it. The realization that there was suddenly nothing I would not do for another human being.

But becoming the mother of a little girl when so much of your own girlhood felt lonely and unsheltered and improvised from survival instincts? That rearranges something deep inside you.

I spent years wondering what was wrong with me that I didn’t get to have what everybody else seemed to receive so effortlessly. Why nobody had ever shown me how to be a daughter. Or a girl. Or eventually, somebody’s mother. Everything about womanhood felt pieced together from fragments and observation and the dim glow of fires that had already burned out before I arrived.

And then suddenly she was here.

I remember looking at her after she was born, this tiny furious incandescent little thing with her whole life stretched out in front of her, and crying so hard I could barely catch my breath because underneath all the awe and gratitude and overwhelming love was this deep animal panic climbing steadily up my throat.

How was I supposed to teach a little girl how to move safely through a world that had so often felt unsafe to me? How was I supposed to show her how to become a woman when so much of my own girlhood had felt like wandering through darkness without a guide rope, piecing together womanhood from absence and observation alone?

Because suddenly you’re no longer just raising your daughter. You’re grieving the little girl you once were at the exact same time.

I had no map for any of it. No inherited softness. No blueprint lovingly passed down through generations of women before me. Just instinct and terror and this fierce overwhelming certainty that I would die before I let the world harden her the way it had tried to harden me.

So I made myself a promise.

I will build the map as we walk.

I will.

Even if I have to invent parts of it from scratch.

Even if I am still healing while trying to help her grow.

Even if this world feels upside down and inside out and increasingly cruel toward women and girls in ways that leave me oscillating between heartbreak and incandescent rage.

Because now I look at her at almost thirteen years old and realize she already has fewer rights than women had when she was born.

How am I supposed to look at this brilliant little girl who still sometimes plays with dolls while simultaneously becoming this sharp, funny, thoughtful young woman and quietly accept a world determined to shrink her before she’s even fully grown?

I can’t.

I fucking can’t.

I cannot look at my son and stand by while a culture tries to calcify boys into hard, empty little vessels incapable of emotional softness. I look at this beautiful, sensitive, hilarious kid who still hugs me goodbye, who still yells “love you” across the house, who has more compassion in his pinky finger than half the men screaming into microphones every night combined, and I feel this almost feral protectiveness rise up inside me.

I refuse to hand my daughter a future that keeps demanding women make themselves smaller so fragile men can continue feeling big.

I refuse to raise my son inside a culture where predators are rewarded with microphones and money and political office while decency is treated like weakness and cruelty becomes some grotesque national pastime.

I refuse to teach my children that when hateful people seize control the correct response is silence.

They’re the reason I survived.

They’re the reason I’m still here.

There were nights where everything felt so unbearably heavy I genuinely did not know how to carry it one more day, and then one of my children would wander into the room sleep-drunk asking for a glass of water, completely unaware they had just pulled me back from the edge of myself again.

They tether me here.

Over and over and over again.

And I’ll be damned if I survived everything I survived just to quietly hand them over to a country being hollowed out by cruelty, corruption, misogyny, racism, authoritarianism, and men so deeply threatened by other people’s freedom they’ve convinced themselves equality is oppression.

They deserve more than survival.

They deserve wonder.

They deserve a life where kindness is not treated like naivety and tenderness is not something people have to apologize for. A life where my daughter does not have to carve herself into smaller quieter pieces just to safely move through it. A life where my son can remain soft-hearted and emotionally open without this culture trying to beat that gentleness out of him.

I want them to inherit a country where truth still matters. Where democracy still matters. Where compassion is not mocked. Where cruelty is not celebrated. Where powerful men cannot prey on the vulnerable and then drape themselves in flags and applause while everybody else is told to pretend this is normal.

They are my why.

They are my reason for being.

And I will do anything to protect them.

Anything.

I will fight for the life I want them to inherit with whatever strength I have in me for however long I am lucky enough to remain here beside them. I will shield them when I can. Stand in front of them when I have to. Blaze trails for them. Open doors for them. Beat back the cruelty and the cynicism and the bullies and the cruel little people who want to dim their light before it fully has the chance to burn.

I am their mother.

And I will never, ever stop fighting for them.

For them, and for every child out there whose small bright beautiful life deserves the chance to unfold without fear dimming it before it even has the chance to fully bloom.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the incredible women out there doing this impossible, exhausting, beautiful job every day. The women holding families together with tired eyes and overdrawn bank accounts and grocery lists and sheer force of will. The women carrying everyone else while quietly carrying their own grief too. The protectors. The fighters. The warriors. The badasses.

You inspire me more than you know.

Happy Mother’s Day.

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!

Stay strong, stay safe, stay connected to each other!

💙 Jo