You do it all with so much grace

I was sitting in a coffee shop the other morning, when a woman walked up to me. She looked at me and touched my arm and said, “I admire you. You do it all with so much grace.” I said thank you, just the way we say it—warm, quick and already moving along. But the words stayed with me. 

They have been sitting with me ever since, because I am at a point in my life right now where I am doing a lot of self-reflecting. I am asking myself the quiet questions: Who am I now? How did I get here? What does any of this even look like from the outside?

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I have spent the last six years in motion—surviving, building and holding everything together. I am only now slowing down enough to really look at the woman who did all that moving. I am not always sure of what I see.

So, when that woman said, “I admire you,” a part of me wanted to turn back around and ask her: What do you mean? Because I don’t know how I do it all with so much grace. I don’t even know what that means. But here is what I do know:

I became a widow at forty.  

That sentence still doesn’t sound real to me. Forty years old. A four-year-old boy who needed his mama. And a hole in the middle of our family where his daddy used to be. Nobody handed me a manual for that. Nobody gave me a plan. I just woke up the next morning and the morning after that, and I did what was in front of me to do.

There was no time to fall apart, because a little boy was watching to see if we were going to be okay. So, I decided that we would be. Not because I felt strong. Because he needed me to be.

I am forty-six now.    

He is ten. No more baby face; he’s growing up right in front of me. So, when people call it grace, I’m caught off guard. Because from where I’m standing, it never looked like grace. It looked like getting up when I didn’t want to. Making breakfast with my eyes still swollen. Answering my son’s questions as honestly as I could, even when I didn’t have the answers for myself.

It looked like crying in the car before I walked into buildings. It looked like packing the lunch and signing the permission slip and keeping the whole thing standing. There was no elegance to it. No poise. I wasn’t gliding through anything.

It isn’t something anybody taught me. There’s no class for this.  I didn’t learn grace. I leaned into it. Because here is what I’ve come to understand. You never really know how you’re going to handle something until you are standing in the middle of it.

Maybe that’s the part I’m only now starting to sit with. I used to think grace was something you could see. Something smooth and composed and put-together. Something a woman performed. But maybe grace was never the way it looked from the outside.

Maybe grace is just the getting up.    

The showing up. The leaning in, even when you don’t know if you have it in you. The continuing to be here (for my son and for myself) on the days it feels like something and the days it feels like nothing at all. I’m still figuring it out. I don’t have this wrapped up in a bow. I’m still in the season of asking the questions, still learning who this woman is. But the next time someone stops me and tells me I do it all with so much grace, I think I’ll let it land a little differently.

I’ll trust that they are seeing something in me that I am only now learning to see in myself. Have you ever surprised yourself with how you survived something you were sure would break you?

Dr. Alisha Reed is a licensed pharmacist and a boy mom who is unapologetic about self-care. She is the creator of the REFILL Strategy, hosts the Your Self Care Prescription podcast, and is passionate about teaching women how to advocate for themselves.