At night, when the house finally surrendered to silence, the familiar creak of a door would come, the shuffle of small feet, and a thin but certain voice drifting down the stairs. “Mommy?” The sound pulled her out of whatever moment she had carved for herself. She sat on the couch with her mug of tea cooling between her palms, caught between irritation and worry, wondering if she should answer or let the silence do the work for her. He was supposed to be asleep. She was supposed to be sleeping. Yet here they were, tangled together in this small midnight ritual neither had planned.
When she finally called back, her voice clipped, the boy would retreat, quick steps padding across the floorboards. “Nothing,” he’d shout, embarrassed to have needed her. Then came the line that always left her breathless in its simplicity, “I was just making sure you were there.” That sentence had a way of sinking deep into her, heavier than it should have been. It was not just about bedtime reassurance but about existence itself, the presence that matters more than anyone realizes until it is almost gone. And she would sit there whispering to herself, “I’m here,” as if those words alone could anchor her to the earth.
She knew the weight of those words because once, when she was only eighteen, she had almost disappeared. There had been a night when she decided life was too unbearable and sharp around the edges, and she tried to step off the path entirely. Looking back now, she sometimes shook her head at the arrogance of that decision. Who was she to think she understood the full story of her life at such a young age, to believe the chapters ahead were not worth waiting for? At that time, though, her pain had felt special, extraordinary even, as if no one else had ever been cracked open in quite the same way. Those were lies, she later realized, the cruel illusions that depression whispers until you believe them enough to act.
Back then, she fought her demons with everything but honesty. She tried to outrun them with food and with hunger, with punishing exercise and reckless drinking, with men who were wrong for her and distractions that numbed her only briefly. The pain was relentless, and she thought if she couldn’t get rid of it, maybe she could get rid of herself. That was the night it almost ended. But it didn’t. And that “didn’t” became the most crucial word of her life. Because what came after was slow healing, first through therapy, then through friendships, then through the family she eventually built.
It took years before she realized the truth that sounds simple but is anything but: the pain is not the opposite of joy, it is tied to it, stitched in so tightly they cannot be pulled apart. The ache and the beauty are part of the same cloth, and one cannot exist without the other. It is labor before the birth, the night before the morning, the thunderstorm that soaks the soil before the flowers open. She had spent years trying to bubble-wrap herself from suffering, bouncing on the surface of her life, pretending to live. That almost killed her more surely than the depression itself.
Now she looked at her children, the boy who leaned over the banister, the siblings who trailed after him, and she understood what she almost lost. Each child carried their own piece of light, their own reasons to stay. As she tucked them in each evening, she brushed hair from their foreheads and whispered again that quiet mantra, “I’m here.” It was part gratitude, prayer, part reminder that she had survived the darkness to stand in this present moment.
She had not missed the story that unfolded, the birthdays and first words, the fights and reconciliations, the peace of mornings with coffee, and the rush of family dinners. She had been given back all of it, the mundane and the miraculous. And she understood something now that she had once fought hard against: life is beautiful, but the beauty does not come free. The pain is the price of admission. And she would pay it gladly, over and over, for one more sunrise, one more laugh, one more chance to hear her child call down from the stairs just to make sure she was still there.
