Parenting while grieving

I crashed the car this week. That’s how I knew I had to slow down and grieve.This episode of Parent Pause is about parenting while grieving. About what happens when someone you love dies and still the world keeps asking things of you. Children to parent. Plans to make. A festive season looming that demands cheer, organisation and energy you simply do not have.Grief does not arrive politely. It does not wait for a clear diary or a quieter time of year. And when you are a parent, it is almost impossible to give grief your full attention. You grieve in snatches. In the car. In the shower. In the gaps between one task and the next. And yet grieving matters deeply. Not because it makes the pain go away, but because ungrieved grief has a way of hardening, or leaking out sideways, or lodging itself somewhere it does not belong.I share my experience of parenting three living children after the death of our baby son. What it was like to want to die and yet still need to parent. How I set myself the intention to grieve healthily, without really knowing what that meant. The strange, tender, imperfect ways we found our way through. Memory books. Evening massages. Trusted adults stepping in. Friends parenting when I could not. Allowing myself to be weird. Wrapping myself in the blanket I last held our baby in and going out into the world anyway.Sixteen years on, I am grieving again. My children are grown now and they can see my sadness and bear it. They hug me, then suggest we play a game. They do not feel responsible for my grief. And that matters.This episode is about letting our children see our sadness without making them responsible for it. About supporting their grief without freezing our own. About how the feelings do not go away, but our capacity to live with them changes. And about how, even when we feel cut adrift, we still parent.Thank you for pausing with me.Take care. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kimmccabe.substack.com/subscribe