Parenting Through Loss: Letting Yourself Be Fed, Too
This guide is for ambitious, high-functioning career mothers learning to navigate the intersection of career, family, and loss
Contributed By: Sarah Kagan · Founder, Keriah Grief Coaching
The Core Challenge
Many working moms are taught to treat their personal lives and professional lives as two separate compartments. But when grief is added to the mix, this exaggerated pressure to "have it all together" leaves most women feeling isolated, exhausted, and unable to receive the support they so freely give to others. The result sounds like strength but is two versions of the same mother white-knuckling through life: the mom who's barely holding on, and the one everyone else thinks they see.
Key Insight
Nourishing your grief is part of how you nourish your family and your career, not a competing demand on your time. The instinct to push through, perform "fine," and keep functioning at full capacity isn't unique to loss; it's the same coping pattern most working moms already default to with sleep deprivation, career pressure, and the invisible load of parenting. The real shift isn't learning some separate "grief coping skill," it's letting grief show you that your job was never to push your needs aside to have it all together; it's to let yourself be fed too.
Practical Strategies
Remind yourself “this is real.” Grief and early motherhood share strikingly similar symptoms: disrupted sleep, increased anxiety, suppressed immune function, and a shaken sense of identity. Recognizing that what you're feeling has a physiological basis, not a personal failing, makes it easier to extend yourself some grace.
Stop measuring "fine" by whether you're still showing up. Being physically present at your desk or in the carpool line isn't the same as actually being there. Grief reduces concentration and increases errors regardless of how composed you look on the outside. Remember that it’s the quality of your time, not the quantity. And sometimes that means less is more.
Tell one person the true cost. Whether it's a manager, a partner, or a friend, naming what grief is actually taking from you (sleep, focus, patience, the ability to plan five steps ahead) turns an invisible load into something someone else can actually help carry. You’ll be surprised to find how many people are carrying their own silent loss.
Make room for grief that doesn't look like grief. We've inherited a narrow script for what mourning is supposed to look like: crying, visiting a cemetery, talking out loud to the person you lost. Creativity, whether it's painting, collaging, journaling, dancing in your kitchen, or making something with your hands, gives grief a way to move through you without needing to perform sadness correctly.
A Small First Step
Before you open your laptop, set a 5 minute timer: use this time to create, in whatever way that means to you, around a memory of the person you lost. Use the good stickers and fun markers you've been saving for your kids', and express yourself with no agenda attached. A few unhurried minutes to nourish your grief can change how you carry it the rest of the day.
After almost a decade in tech, where culture meant office snacks and company swag, Sarah stepped away from tech after welcoming a child and losing her mother within 3 months of each other. Loss has a way of rearranging everything: how you work, how you parent, how you define "fine." Sarah built Keriah Coaching to help working professionals stop performing okay and start actually navigating it. Through honest conversation, practical tools, and lived experience her work is rooted in the knowledge that holding grief, career and family all at once isn't a personality trait, it's a lot, and it’s time to design for the difference.
