The Gift I Wish Someone Had Given Me When My Daughter Was Sick

When Sherry got sick people were incredibly kind.

They showed up for her in the ways people show up — the meals and the messages and the cards and the flowers and the offers of help that were genuine even when they were hard to accept. The community around her was real and warm and I am grateful for every single person who reached toward her during that season.

What I didn’t expect was how invisible I would feel in it.

Not because anyone was unkind to me. Because the attention — correctly, appropriately, as it should have been — was on Sherry. She was the one going through the hard thing. She was the one who needed to be seen and supported and surrounded. The role I was playing was the supporting one. The steady one. The one who made sure everything kept running while the person at the center of the crisis focused on the only job that mattered which was getting well.

I was good at that role. I chose it. I would choose it again without hesitation.

But I want to tell you something about the mothers and the wives and the sisters and the best friends — the women who are playing the supporting role in someone else’s hard season. The ones who are in the waiting room instead of the hospital bed. The ones holding the family together while the person they love holds themselves together.

They need to be seen too.

Not instead of the person going through the hard thing. In addition to. Because they are also going through something. It’s a different something — quieter, less visible, without the clear narrative arc of the person at the center — but it’s real and it’s heavy and it doesn’t end when the crisis ends.

The caregiver’s hard season doesn’t have a clear finish line the way the patient’s does. There’s no discharge date. No moment when the doctor says you can go back to normal now. You just gradually, unevenly, imperfectly make your way back to yourself — if you remember to. If someone reminds you to. If someone sees you in the middle of it and says I know you’re focused on her but I see you too.

The gift I wish someone had given me was that.

Not a thing necessarily — though things can carry that message if they’re chosen right. The gift of being seen as myself. Not as Sherry’s mom in that moment — though I am proud to be Sherry’s mom in every moment. As Sharon. The woman. The person with her own interior season happening quietly alongside the one everyone could see.

What would that gift have looked like?

Something that made me laugh. Something that said I know who you are when you’re not being strong for someone else. Something that acknowledged — gently, warmly, with humor rather than solemnity — that the woman holding everything together is also a person who sometimes needs to be held.

A shirt that said basically fine would have been exactly right.

Not because it would have fixed anything. Because it would have named something. Because some days in that season I was looking for language for what I was — not broken, not fine in the easy sense, but somewhere in between. Still standing. Still myself. Still moving forward even when forward was hard to find.

Basically fine. That was me. I just didn’t have the words for it yet.

If there is a woman in your life who is playing the supporting role in someone else’s hard season — the mom in the waiting room, the wife managing everything at home, the best friend who has been the steady one for so long she’s forgotten to check in with herself — I want to ask you to see her.

Not just the role she’s playing. Her.

Give her something that says I know you’re focused on someone else right now and I think you’re doing it beautifully and I also see you — the whole you, the funny and tired and resilient and basically fine you — and I think that person deserves something too.

She does.

She really does.

The woman in the waiting room is going through something. It doesn’t look like what the person in the hospital bed is going through. It doesn’t get the flowers and the cards and the meals.

But it’s real. And she is real. And she deserves to be seen in it.

Give her something that does that.

She’ll remember it longer than you know.