Hope and grief are not mutually exclusive.

Some weeks of this caregiving life have held more contradictions than I knew a person could hold.

A medication finally working. A new diagnosis arriving in the same month.

A school finally hearing us, after years of pushing. A friendship dissolving because someone couldn’t stay.

My child laughing in the kitchen on a Tuesday. My child asleep in a hospital bed by Friday.

I used to find those weeks the hardest to explain to people. Not because nothing was happening. Because too much was happening, and none of it lined up the way feelings are supposed to line up. I was supposed to be grateful for the medication working. I was supposed to be scared about the diagnosis. The relief and the fear weren’t taking turns. They were happening at the same time, in the same body, and I didn’t have a word for that.

For a long time I thought it meant something was wrong with me. That I wasn’t processing correctly. That a person who had it together would feel the hard things cleanly and the good things cleanly, and move forward without all this noise in between.

What I understand now is that the noise was the honest part.

Caregiving at the level my family lived it doesn’t come with clean emotional timelines. You don’t get to finish grieving one thing before the next thing arrives. You don’t get to stay in relief long enough to settle into it before something else requires your full attention. You are constantly holding more than one true thing, and if you keep waiting for that to resolve into something simpler, you will wait a long time.

The first time I remember saying it out loud was to Craig, late at night after a particularly complicated week. I said something like: I feel like I’m not allowed to be happy about this part because of that part. And he looked at me and said, why not?

I didn’t have an answer. I just had the assumption, which I’d been carrying around so long I’d stopped noticing it was there.

Hope doesn’t mean you’re minimizing the hard things. Grief doesn’t mean you’re failing to appreciate the good ones. They are not competing. They are both responses to a life that is real and complicated and constantly asking more of you than you thought you had.

If you are in a week like that right now, holding more than one truth, I want you to know that the contradiction is not a problem to solve. You are not doing it wrong. You are paying attention.

That’s the hardest thing, sometimes. Staying present to all of it at once, the hope and the grief and everything in between, without collapsing the complexity into something easier to carry.

You don’t have to choose which feeling is the real one. They all are.

💚 Jenn