She Guided Me in Life. Why Not in Death?

I don’t have resolutions this year, just a goal to do more of what makes me happy.

When I had my son 3 years ago, I knew my life was going to fundamentally change in so many ways. I imagined scenarios in my mind, best case and worst. My partner and I planned financially and we made commitments to one another to preserve crumbs of personal time to maintain our independent identities.

All the brainstorming in the world cannot prepare you for what bringing another person into your life (permanently) will be. No matter how smart I thought I was, no matter how much I tried to hedge, I had a chasm of information missing to fully predict how life would change. Two individuals I thought I knew well were about to meet a new individual we knew nothing about.

Among the countless things I discovered postpartum was that every ounce of my creativity would be zapped away by the monumental task of learning about this new little human and keeping him not just alive but thriving. Even if I had the time or energy for my personal hobbies (which, spoiler, I did not), my creative well was dry.

Fast forward to the summer of 2024. My son was one and a half and as every parent I ran into said, it did indeed get better. I found the mental capacity to think about myself again. I craved an outlet that was solely for me. I needed something agile, not my craft hobbies that required space, equipment, and uninterrupted spans of time to make progress. That’s when I pulled out my pen again and started writing.

I’ve been a writer since I was a little girl. I have always kept journals on hand, mostly for recording my own stories but sometimes for scrawling down the ones I dreamed up in my mind. Motherhood sparked a nostalgia in me stemming from grief. The loss of my grandmother Mioko in 2020 is what convinced me I wanted to be a mother. And the birth of my son in 2023 made me miss her deeply. I began writing down the stories of her life she told me in fear of forgetting. I want my son to know her in the ways I did. So I wrote.

My grief and desire to preserve her memory brought me back to my craft. Of course it did—she always had the power to guide me toward my deepest desires in life, why not in death too?

So here I am, writing on Substack. Opening up another part of my soul to the world in hopes that if it resonates with even one person.

Ultimately, there is poetry in this. Because what I truly want my son to know of Mioko is that she showed up for others with no expectations in return.