What It Means To Be a Motherless Mother

For the woman who lost her mother and is still figuring out how to be one.

I heard her before I saw her.

I was in the middle of folding laundry, or maybe washing bottles, when I heard it coming from the living room. Small and off-key and completely serious.

“Ee-ay-ee-ay-yow.”

My dear Eevee. Two years old. Singing that part when Old MacDonald Had a Farm was being played on the TV.

I stopped what I was doing. I just stood there and listened. And I felt that specific kind of happiness that lives right next to heartbreak, because I knew. In a few weeks or maybe a few months, she’ll be able to sing the whole song. She’ll get the words right. She’ll stop saying ee-ay-ee-ay-yow and start saying it properly and this version, this exact mispronounced, unselfconscious, 2-year-old version, will soon be gone forever.

Mama would have been so happy if she heard her first grandchild sing.

The same day, I noticed Emman using his thick thunder thighs to roll over for the first time. It’s like he wanted to get up and walk already even before crawling. I grabbed my phone and took the video while thinking:

If only you were here, Mama.

This is what it means to be a motherless mother. Not just the big grief during funerals, anniversaries and the holidays. It is this. Standing in your living room watching your daughter sing, feeling joy and loss in the same breath, because the person who would have celebrated this the loudest is the person you can no longer call.

If that is where you are tonight, this post is for you.

You dressed me for my first day. I dressed you for your last.

I do not know what outfit my Mama chose for me when I came home from the hospital.

It never came to my mind to ask before. I always assumed there would be a long afternoon for that kind of question. Maybe over coffee or maybe during one of those calls that started with one topic and ended two hours later on something completely different. We were good at those calls. She was good at those calls.

There was no long afternoon.

Mama passed in October 2024, two days after her open heart surgery. She was in a hospital in Manila. We flew straight from California. Peter, Eevee, and I went directly to the morgue. They told us she needed to be prepared for the coffin before they could transport her home to San Fernando, La Union. They needed her clothes.

So Peter and I went to the mall. With Eevee on my hip and grief in my chest that I had no language for yet.

I tried several Filipinianas. My Mama was almost the same size as me. I tried to picture which one she would love to wear.

The saleslady was even kind enough to ask if it was for me and for what occasion.

I could not say it. I stood there in the middle of that mall holding a Filipiniana and I could not make my mouth say that it was for my Mama and she just passed away. That this dress was for her funeral. So I just said: It’s for my mom. She’s going to a celebration.

She is going to a celebration.

I think about that a lot. I did believe that even though it was a time of grief for us, Mama was truly going to a celebration. Her birthday in heaven. That was why I needed to find a dress she would love.

She dressed me for my first day. I dressed her for her last on this Earth.

If only you were here, Mama. I would dress up Eevee and Emman and call you just to show you. I would ask if you felt the same happy, content feeling when you stared at us, your children.

But there is no one to call.

Maybe you have your own version of this moment. The ordinary task that suddenly carried the whole weight of what was lost. The before and after that lives inside the most unremarkable things now. Choosing an outfit. Folding laundry. Reaching for the phone.

Your grief in those moments is real. Every single one of them.

And yet, somehow, the ordinary moments are also where she feels closest.

I’m saving all my stories for when we meet again.

There is an image I keep going back to.

Mama sitting on the porch of our home in Baguio City. Her warm, cozy nightgown. A big coffee mug in her hands, stirring the teaspoon slowly and making that familiar sound of metal hitting ceramic, the way she always did, like she was in no hurry and the world could wait. Every morning she would sit there and greet the passersby by name. And I mean everyone. The neighbor already late for work, walking fast, eyes forward, but Mama would greet anyway. Mid-stride, that neighbor would slow down, smile, and somehow end up in a 5-minute conversation they did not have time for.

She was not trying to hold anyone up. She just genuinely wanted to know how they were.

After she passed, our neighbors told us they missed her. That the mornings felt different now. That there was nobody left on that porch who knew their name.

If only you were here. I know you would have stories for me too.

I have so many stories saved up for my Mama.

Eevee met her once in person. Just once — when we flew to the Philippines in August 2024 when she had a heart attack. Sometimes I show Eevee photos of her. She stares at the screen quietly, the way toddlers do when they are trying to understand something too big for their words. I wonder what she remembers. I wonder if she remembers anything at all.

Emman never met her. He never will. Not on this side.

When something worth sharing happens in this house, and something always is, I do what I always do now.

I tell Mama in my mind.

It is the least I can do. It is also the most I can do. So I do it every time. Every new word Eevee says. Every milestone Emman hits. Each ordinary Tuesday when one of them does something that stops me mid-sentence and fills my chest all at once. I think of her. I tell her. And I trust that somehow, in whatever way the other side of this life works, she already knows.

If only you were here, I would have called you before the day was over. I would have described that song, that roll, that smile, down to the last detail, and you would have listened like it was the most important thing you had ever heard.

Maybe you do this too. Maybe you have your own version of the mental phone call. Your own running list of things you are saving up. If you do, you are not strange. You are not stuck. You are just a daughter who loved someone, still loving her the only way left available.

I believe there is a porch somewhere on the other side of this life. That one morning I will walk up to it and she will already be looking up from her coffee because she heard my voice. And I will finally have somewhere to put every story I have been holding.

Mama, I have so much to tell you. I’ll save it for when we meet again.

You raised me to be ready for the world. But I was never ready to lose you.

Here is the thing about mothers that I did not understand until I became one.

Everything you pour into your children is quiet preparation for the day they leave.

The hardest thing I have realized about being a mother is this: everything I pour into Eevee and Emman, every brave thing I teach them, every time I encourage them to try again, every morning I show up even when I have nothing left, I am slowly, lovingly, teaching them how to live without me.

The saddest and most beautiful part of motherhood is that you are raising the one person you cannot live without, to be able to live without you.

My Mama knew this. She just never said it out loud. Maybe because saying it out loud would have been too hard to carry.

She worked so hard to prepare me for life. I had my achievements, my degree, my career, and honestly, at the time they did not feel like anything extraordinary to me. They were just the next thing. But I know now that every single one of them made her proud in a way I will never fully understand, because I have my own children now and I know what it feels like to watch them do something and think: I had something to do with that.

She had everything to do with that.

But there is a gap in every parent’s preparation that I think we all quietly skip over. Because to name it is too hard. Because the love is too big to look at directly.

Nobody teaches you what to do when they go.

I was ready for the world. I was not ready for the world without her in it. And if you are reading this, maybe you know exactly what I mean. Maybe you are also mothering in the gap, reaching for advice she never got to give, making decisions she never got to weigh in on, trying to be for your children what she was for you, without the person who could have shown you how.

If only you were here, Mama. I would tell you that your preparation worked. That I am still standing. That I am trying to do for Eevee and Emman what you did for me, to pour into them so completely that they will be ready for whatever this world asks of them, including the parts I will not be there for.

I think about that every time I sit with my kids. Every bedtime prayer over 2 small heads. Every patient moment and every hard conversation.

I am preparing them for a life I will eventually not be part of.

That used to feel like a sad thought.

Now it steadies me. Because I know what good preparation looks like. I was on the receiving end of it for 30 years.

My Mama showed me every single day, and I only understood it after she was already gone.

No mother, no father. But a God who will never, ever leave.

I lost Mama in October 2024.

Nine months later, in July 2025, I lost Papa too. My brother walked into the house and Papa was already gone, looking like he had simply laid down for a rest. Peaceful. Quiet. The way he always was.

“Bye Eevee. Matutulog muna si Lolo.” That was the last thing he said to her over video call the night before. “Bye Eevee. Lolo is just going to sleep.” He did not wake up.

I was pregnant with Emman when we buried Papa. I flew home carrying our second baby in my body and our first baby on my hip, and I buried my last living parent. Emman was born in December 2025. He will never know either of them except through photos and through the way his mama sometimes goes quiet in the middle of an ordinary day.

I am 32 years old and I have no more parents left on this earth.

Maybe that sentence is yours too. Maybe you lost one parent, maybe both. Perhaps it happened recently or maybe it has been years and the world expects you to be over it by now. Either way, if you are mothering without your mother, you know the specific ache of doing the hardest job of your life without the one person who did it first and could have walked you through it.

If only you were here, Mama. I would call you on the hard mornings and I would ask you how you did it. Then I would tell you I finally understand what it cost you. But you are not here. So I learned to call on the One who always answers.

My Mama prayed like God was her closest friend. My Papa trusted Him the quiet way, steadily, without needing to say much about it. Together they pointed us toward Him long before we understood what they were pointing at. God did not leave when they did.

He is still here.

“The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”

Deuteronomy 31:8

Moses said these words to Joshua on the edge of the Promised Land. Joshua was about to lead an entire nation into territory none of them had seen, toward battles none of them were ready for. And he would do it without Moses, the only leader he had ever known, beside him. He was, in every practical sense, on his own.

And God said: I go before you. I will be with you. I will never leave.

He was there when Mama was on that operating table. He was there in the house when my brother found Papa. God was in every room I thought I was walking into alone.

And Friend, He has been in yours too.

God was there in the hospital room and in the funeral home. He has been there in the car ride home when you didn’t know how to go back to normal life. He has been there in your kitchen on the Tuesday mornings when the grief finds you and nobody else in the room can see it.

That promise is for you too. Right now.

You have no mother to call on a hard morning. Maybe no father either. But you have a Father who goes before you into every room you have not entered yet. Every hard day you have not lived yet. Each milestone your parents will miss. Every moment you will need more than you have.

Being an orphan on this earth does not mean you are without a parent.

You have a Father who was, who is, and who will always be. He is not going anywhere.

And unlike every phone call that now goes unanswered.

He picks up every time.

Friend, before you go.

If you are reading this at 2am with a sleeping baby on your chest and grief in your throat, I want you to know something: the ache you feel is not weakness. It is love that has nowhere left to go. And that kind of love does not have a timeline.

You are not behind in your grief. Do not think you are doing it wrong. You are a daughter who misses her mother while raising children of her own, and that is one of the loneliest and most beautiful things a woman can carry.

There is a Father who has been counting every night you did not sleep. Every tear you cried in the car before you went inside. Every time you smiled for your kids while something in you was breaking, He has not missed one. He is not keeping score. He is keeping watch.

If you want to read more about how grief brought me back to my Bible after 20 years away, you can read that story here. And if you want somewhere quiet to start talking to God again, even if the words won’t come, even if all you have is the ache, I made a free Daily Prayer Journal for exactly that kind of morning.

Tonight, if you do one thing: open your Bible to Deuteronomy 31:8. Read it once. Then read it again with your own name in it.

“The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you, [your name]; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”

He already went ahead of you into tomorrow.

You don’t have to be ready. You just have to be willing.