579 Monday Mornings

There have been 579 Monday mornings since April 11, 2015.

The first few hundred I just tried to get through.

I’m not sure when that changed. There was no moment I can point to. No morning I woke up and felt like myself again. It was slower than that. Quieter. More like noticing, one day, that I had stopped bracing for the week ahead and had started just living it.

Grief does not end. It shifts.

And for a long time I thought that shift was something that happened to you. I was something time did while you were not paying attention. I don’t believe that anymore. The shift is something you earn. By staying in it long enough to let it change what you are made of.

Of the 579 Monday mornings since April 11, 2015, maybe 50 of them I have actually looked forward to. All of them in the last year or so.

I am sharing this with you because I want you to know what the other side of this can look like. Just facing the week instead of surviving it.

Maddie stopped being the reason I could not function and started being the reason I could. I do not know exactly when. I just know it happened somewhere around Monday morning 400 or 500. When I stopped counting and started building.

I built The MentorWell because of that shift. Because at some point I stopped asking why we did not get the help we needed and started asking what I could do about it. Every parent who gets what we did not get. It became about the early awareness, the right conversation, the support before it becomes a crisis. It means April 11, 2015 pointed somewhere.

That matters to me more than I know how to say.

But this post is not really about me.

It is about the parent reading this who is carrying something heavy and has not told anyone yet. Maybe you are in the early years of a loss. Maybe you are not grieving a child but you are afraid of what you are seeing in one. Maybe you are somewhere in between. You’re not in crisis, but not okay either. Sensing something. Watching. Waiting for it to either get worse or go away.

I want to speak to all of you, because grief and fear live closer together than most people admit. They are both forms of love with nowhere to go.

If you are in the early years of loss, the weight does not stay this heavy. Not because time heals. Because you get stronger around it. The version of you standing on the other side of this is not someone who stopped missing them. It is someone who learned how to carry them differently. That person is already in you. You are building them right now, on mornings exactly like this one.

If you are a parent who is worried — not grieving, but sensing something is off and not knowing what to do about it — that instinct is worth listening to. Not because it always means something serious. Because ignoring it never makes it smaller.

Both of you deserve somewhere to go with this.

When Something Feels Off is a private community for parents navigating the space between fine and not fine. Between noticing and knowing. Between wanting to help and not knowing how. More than 150 parents from around the world at different points in the same kind of story. No pressure. No judgment. Just people who understand your Monday mornings because they are living them too.

It is free to join (but not for much longer). And it is the place I put everything I wish someone had handed me before Monday morning number one.