The Memorials We Don't Mark
My oldest son was born Memorial Day weekend thirteen years ago in New York City. Two weeks late. Already larger than life at 9 pounds 10 ounces.
My youngest son turned one twelve days ago. He was born May 13. Less than two weeks before his big brother turned thirteen this past Sunday.
The same nine-day stretch of calendar that opened my motherhood is now bookended by both their birthdays. A second birth, after thirteen years of becoming, in the same season as the first.
I did not know with my oldest that his life and mine would become a series of crossings. Three states. Two major cities. New York and San Francisco. A marriage. A divorce. Perimenopause. Miscarriage. Reinvention after reinvention. Then a second chance at motherhood at the edge of forty. A blended family of four boys.
Somewhere out there a woman my age is picking her midlife crisis off a menu. Peptides. Pickleball. Bangs. A panic baby. I am not judging. I tried half that list. But underneath every single one of those is the same thing nobody puts on the menu. Grief.
Every birthday since the first one has carried two truths at once. Celebration and reckoning.
This is the body-truth conversation we do not have enough. We have language for the losses that came with funerals. We do not have language yet for the losses that came with paperwork. Or with silence. Or with the slow midlife unraveling of an identity that used to fit.
But those are memorials too. We just do not mark them.
What I remember about that hospital weekend is not the room. It is the woman I was becoming without realizing it. The version of me who still believed if I loved hard enough, worked hard enough, held everyone together carefully enough, I could outrun loss.
A birthday cluster like this one has a way of stripping things down to what remains after survival.
My son grew up alongside my becoming. His identity shifted while mine did too. We both learned that rebuilding is not graceful. It is loud. Exhausting. Lonely. Beautiful. Sometimes all in the same season.
The grief I have carried most quietly is the loss of my sister while we are both still alive.
It happened slowly. Quietly. In unanswered calls in the months leading up to my youngest son’s birth. In silence during the pregnancy I had prayed for. In the absence of someone who never came to meet the baby she knew was coming.
He turned one twelve days ago. She has still never met him.
What hurt most was realizing she knew how to show up when my life was collapsing, but disappeared when I finally started rebuilding it. There is a particular loneliness in understanding that some people are more comfortable with your wounds than your healing.
I grieved the version of sisterhood I thought my sons would inherit. I grieved the idea that becoming a mother again at forty might soften old fractures. Instead, I learned some relationships do not end with a fight. They end with an absence so consistent it becomes its own answer.
And still, every birthday season since, I feel it. The ache of someone still alive who chose not to witness the life I fought to rebuild. The ache of a one-year-old whose aunt has only ever existed in family stories.
That is what disenfranchised grief actually looks like. The kind nobody hands you a casserole for. The kind that does not get a microphone, a flag at half-mast, or a family photo with everyone holding hands.
The other grief I have buried quietly is the version of me who thought love was earned through suffering.
For years, I thought love was earned through overextending. Through rescuing. Through surviving impossible things quietly. I carried entire relationships on my back because I thought being needed was the same thing as being loved.
Putting that down felt terrifying at first. Like stepping into open air without knowing if anyone would catch me.
And the truth: some people noticed immediately because they no longer had access to the version of me that abandoned herself for everyone else.
But the people who truly loved me. They finally got to meet me without the exhaustion.
If you have been reading me for any length of time, you know I built The PHASE™ out of years like the ones I am describing here. Five volumes for the perimenopause, hormone, daily architecture, self-trust, and execution rebuilds that come at us in midlife with no warning and no map. The framework lives at thisisphase.co.
But here is what I did not put in the workbooks until now.
The framework was not built after the grief lifted. The framework was built INSIDE the grief. Every Volume is downstream of a loss I had to name out loud before I could move through it. Vol I is the perimenopause map I built while I was grieving the body that used to work. Vol II is the hormone primer I built while I was grieving the doctor who never listened. Vol III is the daily architecture rebuild I wrote while I was grieving the version of motherhood I had pictured. Vol IV is the self-trust I rebuilt while I was grieving the people who only knew the older version of me. Vol V is the execution I learned while I was grieving the woman who used to outrun loss with productivity.
Five volumes. Five unmarked memorials made workable.
The rebuild did not begin after the grief. The grief was the blueprint.
Every heartbreak, every silence, every person who disappeared when I stopped shrinking myself. All of it cleared space for a life that could finally hold the truth of who I am now.
Grief was not proof I was broken. It was proof something old could no longer survive in me.
And honestly, some things needed to die so I could finally live without apologizing for becoming.
Here is the line I would say to my sons in twenty years, when they are old enough to understand it.
I was not tired, boys. I was carrying the weight of becoming someone new while mourning everyone who could only love the older version of me.
You saw a mother trying to hold things together. What you did not see was how many nights I sat awake grieving relationships, identities, expectations, and dreams that no longer fit the life we were building.
I was not grieving because life fell apart. I was grieving because I finally stopped abandoning myself to keep everyone else comfortable.
That kind of rebuilding costs something.
If I could invent a ritual for midlife, it would not look like a holiday. It would look like dusk.
Women would gather outside. No performances. No fixing. No pretending we are “past it.” Just a long table somewhere with candles, photographs, old journal pages, wedding rings we no longer wear, letters we never sent, names we do not say out loud anymore.
We would speak honestly about the versions of ourselves we had to bury to survive. The marriages. The friendships. The ambitions. The innocence. The family dynamics that never healed the way we hoped they would.
And before leaving, every woman would write down one thing she is no longer willing to carry into the next season of her life.
Not to erase it. Not to resent it. Just to finally stop dragging it behind her like proof she loved deeply.
I want the woman reading this to stop minimizing the losses that did not come with funerals.
The friendship that disappeared after the divorce. The sister who stopped calling. The identity she outgrew. The version of motherhood she thought she would have. The life she fought for that still cost her people she loved.
Sit with it. Send it to your sister if you need to. Or do not. Some grief does not need confrontation to be real.
But at minimum, tell yourself the truth this week.
Not every absence is accidental.
Not every relationship survives your healing.
And rebuilding your life is still something worthy of honoring.
MOMumentally,
Erika xx
Erika Hanafin Austria
Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia
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