It's Okay To Regret Having Kids
Contemplating the unlived life of my mom. Plus, how to dress mindfully and the best snacks of 2021.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve been awake in the mornings in my apartment. The light hits differently before noon. Mom was a night owl too, and so if I was ever up in the morning, I was tip-toeing around so as to not wake her. I find myself instinctively doing this again, as if she’s still here. What was once her room is now mine, and still, I expect to see her body—a giant lump under the blankets; to hear her deep inhalations that bridged on snoring because she was a smoker—whenever I pass by the bedroom.
This is the strange thing about grief, the more time that accumulates between her being here and not being here, the more I long for her physical presence. I thought grief was supposed to get easier with time, but I think it gets harder. It’s like my naive, child brain thinks she’s gone away for a little while, and she’s just taking a really, really long time to come home.
There’s a common…