Messy Mom Moments: A Journey Through Grief and Growth

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As I watched Alex’s packed car pull away, grief pulsed through my chest.

I should be happy for him. I am happy for him.

My oldest graduated from college this year. He accepted a dream job and moved into his first apartment this summer. This is exactly what I raised him to do. He is stepping into an independent adulthood with an education, a career, friends, confidence, and an apartment he gets to make his own.

Milestones and Memories

There have been plenty of milestones along the way. Preschool graduation. High school graduation. College graduation. Each one marked the end of something, but this departure landed more heavily than all of them.

As his car disappeared, I tried to pinpoint where the grief was coming from.

Was I sad that he was leaving?

No. I’m excited for his future. I want him to build a path that belongs to him.

Was I grieving his little-boy self and the unabashed hugs he used to shower me with?

Well, yes. A little.

A lot.

I miss the boy who wrapped his whole body around me without worrying about whether he was too old or too cool to need his mom. I miss the version of motherhood where I could gather him into my arms and know, at least for that moment, exactly what he needed from me.

But even that wasn’t the deepest source of the ache.

The question underneath my grief was one I didn’t particularly want to touch:

Did I damage him?

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Did the complexities of our family story leave wounds he will carry into adulthood? Did a hostile divorce with his dad place obstacles in front of him that will make certain areas harder than they needed to be?

What about my imperfect parenting?

Was I too controlling?

Was I attentive enough?

Did I recognize what he needed when he needed it, or was I so consumed with surviving our circumstances that I missed things?

Did I shield him well enough?

These are terrible questions for a mother because there are no clean answers. We cannot pull apart our children’s personalities and determine which pieces came from genetics, which came from love, which came from hardship, and which developed in response to the things they endured.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

A few days before he moved, I offered to take him to IKEA to buy a dresser for his new apartment.

It seemed like such an ordinary errand. A dresser. A few drawers. One more box of furniture we would carry home and assemble.

I nearly didn’t make it through the store without sobbing.

IKEA held far too many versions of our family.

I could still picture eating in the cafeteria when the kids were little. I could see myself leaving Alex in the childcare area with the pool of balls while I attempted to shop without counting heads every few minutes.

Another memory surfaced: creating Easter houses during one of IKEA’s children’s activities—and the weeping that followed when the wind knocked his house over in the parking lot.

I could see the homeschool room I once planned so carefully. I could see the desks, bookshelves, bins, labels, and all the hope I placed into organizing a room that would somehow help me organize our lives.

I thought of the hours spent putting together dressers, beds, desks, and chairs. IKEA furniture became the backdrop to different stages of our family, each instruction booklet promising that if I followed the numbered steps and used the right screws, everything would fit together as intended.

Parenting did not come with those instructions.

Neither did betrayal.

Neither did divorce.

There was no diagram showing me how to hold a family together while it was being pulled apart. There was no tiny Allen wrench capable of tightening the pieces that had come loose.

I thought about the little cinnamon buns you can only get at IKEA. I could still picture exploring the carefully staged rooms with my mom during the years when she could walk for miles. We would wander through imaginary kitchens and bedrooms, talking about what we liked and what we would change.

Now I was walking through those same displays with my adult son, helping him choose furniture for a home that would no longer include me.

The trip felt like a bookend to a messy season I had tried so hard to prepare him for. At one end was a young mother wandering through IKEA with small children, cinnamon buns, homeschool dreams, and the belief that enough effort could create the home she wanted for her family.

At the other end was me, standing beside my grown son as he chose a dresser for his first apartment, wondering whether all that effort had been enough.

And I was angry.

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I was angry that this meaningful transition had to occur in the middle of another wave of legal conflict with a man who continues to create unnecessary ripples in my world.

Two weeks earlier, my former husband filed a motion to depose my elderly parents, forcing them to retain an attorney to represent them. The deposition was dropped at the last minute, but not before they had to pay $3,000 for legal representation. The following Monday, he filed a motion asking the court to hold me in contempt over how I communicated an educational decision.

The week after Alex moved out, my next son was scheduled to move into college. I would have to spend that day around their dad, followed the next morning by a deposition involving him.

One son was moving out. Another was heading to college. My elderly parents had been pulled into our litigation. Court motions were arriving. A deposition was approaching.

To say my nervous system was in a state of haywire and mayhem would be an understatement.

My body didn’t know which experience it was supposed to process first. Was I celebrating?

Grieving?

Preparing?

Defending?

Letting go?

Holding everyone together?

There was no space between these events for my body to catch up with everything unfolding around me.

Yet when I bring everything down to the bubbling center of that deep ache, the fear is not really about IKEA, the empty bedroom, or even the sight of Alex’s car pulling away.

I am afraid I wasn’t a good enough mom.

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What if I really wounded him in ways I cannot undo?

Who would he have become if chaos and trauma had not been introduced into his story? Would he be more trusting? More open? Would relationships come more easily to him? Would adulthood feel less complicated?

Would he be an amazing, successful man with fewer internal battles to fight?

He might be a different person.

That thought hurts because when he was born, I wanted to guard every part of him.

I remember rocking him to sleep and studying his face. I stared at every feature, trying to permanently record it in my memory—the shape of his eyes, the curve of his cheeks, the way his mouth moved as he slept.

I knew those days would pass, even though I could not comprehend how quickly.

I was so excited to be his mama.

I didn’t hold that baby and dream about making him resilient. I didn’t hope his path would include painful things so he could become stronger. I wanted him to have a beautiful childhood. I wanted him to feel safe, loved, supported, and free to become who God created him to be.

Nothing unfolded the way I imagined while rocking him.

There are things my children experienced that I wish I could remove from their stories. There were years when survival consumed more of me than I wanted it to. There were decisions I made with limited information, limited resources, and an overwhelmed nervous system.

I was not the mother I imagined I would be in every moment.

No mother is.

I also know I fought for them.

I stayed present when I was exhausted. I created traditions in the middle of instability. I homeschooled, drove, organized, prayed, advocated, assembled furniture, showed up for graduations, and kept imagining a future for them when my own future felt fractured.

I loved them through circumstances I could not always control.

That does not erase what happened to them. Love is not a magical shield that prevents children from being affected by conflict, divorce, betrayal, or parental mistakes. But love is not irrelevant, either.

My children also grew up knowing someone was dedicated to them. They knew I would keep showing up. They watched me fall apart in places, but they also watched me continue. They saw that a story can be disrupted without being discarded.

The only peace I can reach is the knowledge that God has them.

God can work with the parts of their stories I wish I could rewrite. He can use what was awful without calling it good. He can meet my children in the places where my parenting fell short and where the actions of others wounded them.

I know we talk about growing stronger through painful things. I believe growth can emerge from suffering. But as a mama, I still wish strength had not required so much from them.

I would have preferred they become strong because they were securely loved, not because they had to adapt to chaos.

Perhaps—there’s that word I try not to overuse—the question is not whether I gave Alex a childhood untouched by pain. I didn’t. I couldn’t.

The question is whether I gave him enough love, truth, faith, and room to build a life beyond it.

As I watched him drive away, I was not only watching my son leave home. I was watching the end of the years in which I could convince myself that I still had time to fix everything before adulthood arrived.

Adulthood arrived anyway.

It arrived with a packed car, a dream job, a new apartment, and an IKEA dresser waiting to be assembled.

I hope my children know that I love them.

I hope they know I have been dedicated to them, even when my decisions were imperfect and my own pain complicated our days.

I hope that devotion becomes something sturdy inside them—not proof that nothing bad happened, but proof that what happened is not the only thing that shaped them.

And I hope it carries them through the bumps we have already endured and the ones I can no longer shield them from.

Maybe that is what it means to let an adult child leave home.

You release them into the life they are building, trusting that your love will travel with them, even when the road ahead bends beyond your sight.

Between holding his little hand and watching him build his own life, I hope he knows my love never let go.

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