Missing Him While He’s Still Here

I didn’t expect the grief to feel like this.

Tears again, as I write this, arrive without warning.

My chest tightening over moments that have shifted and slipped quietly into the past.

My son is eight and a half, and the changes feel vast and wide.

I feel such pride in the human he is becoming. He is thoughtful, capable and increasingly becoming his own person. And yet, alongside that pride lives something tender and aching: the grief of a relationship changing in ways I can’t stop, slow, or negotiate with.

He was a velcro child. My shadow. Always close. Always seeking skin, reassurance, proximity.
It wasn’t always easy. There were days I felt touched-out, stretched thin, digging deep to meet his need for safety when my own reserves felt low. And still - I met it. Over and over again. I showed up, because something in him needed to know, in his bones, that I was there.

And now… that phase seems to be passing.

What surprises me is not that it has passed - I understand developmentally that it must. What surprises me is how much it hurts.

I’ve become acutely aware of last times.

From the last time he slept on my shoulder as a baby, whilst I chanted AUM over and over as he fell asleep, I became aware of the phenomenon of the final time that something occurs before it slips into the past when we are looking elsewhere.

I remember walking into school together at the end of last term. His hand was in mine. Then, almost imperceptibly, something shifted. He gently pulled his hand away - not in rejection, but in readiness. A quiet declaration of independence. I felt as equally proud as I did sad - a present witness to a door preparing to gently close.

Recently, the first mornings have come, where his first waking moment no longer reached for me first. The skin-to-skin closeness he once sought out so instinctively seems to be fading away. This last week, I have missed him desperately, even while he is right beside me.

This grief feels kind of disorienting because nothing is “wrong.”

He hasn’t left.

I haven’t failed.

This is not loss in the traditional sense.

It is grief for a version of a relationship that is completing its season.

This last week, I have felt myself grasping for something that is passing. Aparigraha (non-grasping) reminds me to practice letting go. Not because I am ready, but because life is moving. The ache in my chest, the waves of tears, the hollow feeling that arrives without warning - this is the nervous system renegotiating attachment, trusting that love does not disappear when what it looks like changes.

Yoga teaches me to stay present with sensation without trying to fix it, to breathe inside the contraction rather than bypass it. This is not something to push away. It is something to be with.

We don’t talk enough about this kind of motherhood grief - the kind that comes not from rupture, but from successful attachment. From having done the work well enough that a child can now turn outward, confident, steady and unafraid.

There is nothing to fix. I’m just incredibly aware that my nervous system that spent years co-regulating with another, is suddenly learning a new rhythm.

I know our relationship is meant to change. I know that what comes next will be rich, surprising, and beautiful in ways I can’t yet imagine.

And still, I grieve.

I grieve the magnet like qualities that had him seeking me out from moment to moment. 

I grieve being his whole world.

I grieve the way my body once felt like home to him.

This healthy cycle completing itself feels hard.

This natural and very healthy withdrawal feels hard.

I'm innately aware of how my awareness lingers at the contact point, wanting to hold it as I feel it slipping through my fingers, while the life that I know changes.

So, I stay with what is emerging at the boundary between us. To allow grief, pride, love, and loneliness to coexist.

So, as I gently re-locate myself in this relationship, I’m sitting with a tonne of grief.

Perhaps this is the hidden cost of loving deeply: that when a child grows as they are meant to, a parent must also simultaneously let something in themselves die.

So I’m letting myself cry.

Not because I want things to stay the same.

But because something sacred is passing.