The Grief That Has No Villain
There’s a particular kind of grief that’s almost impossible to explain to people who haven’t lived it. It doesn’t come from a falling out, a betrayal, or a difficult relationship. There’s no one to blame, no wound you can point to and say that’s where it started. It’s quieter than that. And in some ways, so much harder to carry.
It’s the grief of raising your children far from the people who love you most.
On February 8, 2013, my mother caught the last flight out from Buffalo to Boston before a massive snowstorm shut everything down. She made it. She always makes it — that’s who she is. She showed up at the hospital, walked into the room with no bag, just her purse, and something in me that had been braced for months just… let go.
That’s the only way I can describe it. My nervous system exhaled.
I didn’t realize until that moment how tightly I had been holding everything. How much energy it takes to be the one who holds it together when there’s no one nearby to hand it to, even briefly. She walked in and I could finally just be a daughter. A woman who needed her mom. Not a competent adult managing a major life event — just me.
And then, as it always goes, she had to leave.
And I was back to doing it alone.
I want to talk to the mothers who know exactly what I mean.
The ones who grew up in big, warm, loud families where belonging was never in question — and then built their adult lives somewhere else. Somewhere good, even. Somewhere that made sense on paper. But somewhere that isn’t home in the way that matters when a baby won’t stop crying at 2am, or when you’ve been touched by small hands all day and you desperately need someone to just sit with you on the couch and not need anything.
The grief I’m talking about isn’t about a bad family dynamic. That’s a different, valid pain. This grief is stranger and in some ways very disorienting…because there’s no villain in the story. Your family is wonderful. They would be here if they could. They show up when it counts, catch last-minute flights in snowstorms, love your children fiercely across the miles.
They just don’t live down the street.
And that gap, that specific, ordinary, daily gap, is something nobody really prepares you for.
I’ve been in the Boston area for fifteen years now. I have built a life here that I’m genuinely proud of. A business I love. Children who are becoming amazing humans. A marriage that is real and deep.
And I have done so much of it without my mom nearby. Without my sisters. Without my best friends who known me and don’t need me to explain myself before I can get to the actual conversation.
What I didn’t expect, what I don’t think any of us expect, is how it all accumulates… like that snowstorm. It’s not one hard moment. It’s thousands of small ones. The pediatrician appointment where you wish your strong nurse mother could just sit in the waiting room with you. The first day of school drop-off when you’re holding it together for your kid and there’s no one to fall apart in front of afterward. Or worst of all, the ordinary Tuesday when you’re depleted in a way that only another woman who loves you could replenish… and she’s a thousand miles away.
And for me, there wasn’t even the relief valve of work to return to. I was a stay at home mom… no familiar office to step into, no colleagues to have a normal adult conversation with, no commute to decompress in, no professional identity to remind me that I existed outside of this role (because I had quit my corporate life and just went full time with photography the year before!) There was no break in the day where I got to just be April for a few hours. It was just me. All day. Every day. Doing the most important and most invisible work there is… feeling completely alone in it.
I want to be clear, I chose that. I am grateful for every moment I had with my kids in those early years. But the choosing of it doesn’t make the isolation of it any less real. You can be grateful and depleted at the same time. You can love your children with your whole heart and still grieve the parts of yourself that had nowhere to go.
You get good at managing it. Too good, maybe. You learn to hold your own nervous system together because there’s no other option. You become capable in ways you didn’t know you were capable of. And you grieve quietly, in the spaces between things, in a way that doesn’t have a name or a proper mourning period.
The hardest part, and I say this gently, to the women nodding right now… is that the strength it builds in you is real. What you develop in that solitude, that self-reliance, that deep knowing of yourself when there’s no one to reflect you back, it’s genuinely yours. I wouldn’t trade who I’ve become.
But I also don’t want to romanticize it. It is hard. It has been hard. And you are allowed to say so without being ungrateful for the life you’ve built.
Both things are true. The life is good and you miss your mom. You are strong and you are lonely. You have built something real and you wish you hadn’t had to build it so far from your people.
There is no villain in this story… just distance, and love, and the particular ache of being a woman trying to do right by everyone while quietly longing for the one thing that would make all of it easier.
Someone who loves you that deeply who would just show up and know what to do without me saying a word.
If this is your story too — I see you. This one’s for you.
With all my love and strength,
April
Mom with baby Sienna
April K is a Boston-area photographer specializing in in-home newborn sessions and personal branding photography for women entrepreneurs. She has been documenting women at moments of becoming since 2011 — serving families across Westwood, Needham, Wellesley, Newton, and the greater Boston and New England area.
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