Frankie Samah’s account of grief and new motherhood begins with a particular kind of longing: the instinct, in the bewildering early weeks of caring for a newborn, to reach for the one person whose voice could steady everything. Her mother died on 27 December, just six weeks after her son was born, and Business Insider has published her essay on what it means to grieve and mother at the same time.
When grief and new motherhood arrive together
Samah writes that people now speak honestly about postpartum exhaustion, hormones and sleepless nights, but that very few discuss the way becoming a mother pulls a woman back toward her own mother in almost instinctive ways. Every uncertainty became a reason to reach for her. When her baby would not settle, when his cry sounded slightly different, when she convinced herself something terrible must be wrong, all she wanted was to hear her mother say, ‘Frankie, it’s normal.’
Her mother died on 27 December. Looking back, Samah writes that it feels as though her mother carried herself through one final Christmas for everyone else’s sake. The presents were wrapped carefully, the traditions stayed intact, and even while losing her fight she continued pouring herself into making sure everyone else felt held together.
The disorientation of grieving while postpartum, Samah writes, comes from the fact that motherhood continues regardless of heartbreak. Babies still wake hungry in the night. Tiny onesies still need folding. The body is healing while the heart is breaking, and somehow both things are expected to happen at once.
At night, grief felt louder. She remembers sitting in the dark feeding her son and instinctively reaching for her phone to message her mother before remembering she was no longer there. Even after months had passed, she writes, she sometimes calls her mother’s phone just to hear the voicemail. For a few seconds, hearing her voice creates the briefest illusion that she still exists somewhere close enough to reach.
Joy that aches: the bittersweet weight of milestones
One of the loneliest things about grief, Samah writes, is how heavy joy can become. When her son first started smiling, her immediate instinct was to send videos to her mother. When he let out his first tiny laugh, excitement rose in her so quickly it almost hurt, because heartbreak followed immediately behind it.
She has come to understand that love does not disappear when someone dies; it simply changes shape. Since her mother died, she writes, she has lived life at a million miles an hour, making enormous decisions quickly, choices she probably once would have sat with for much longer. She is preparing for another international move, this time to Malaysia, to experience another part of the world.
She also bought an apartment, driven, she writes, by a desperate need to make sure her children would always have somewhere safe to land. Losing her mother made her realise how suddenly life can fracture. Part of her, she acknowledges, has been trying to build protection against that feeling ever happening again.
Still, there are moments where life softens around the edges: watching her son smile in his sleep, hearing his tiny laugh in the early morning light, sitting in the Kenyan sunrise and holding him while birds begin singing outside. Those moments do not erase grief, but they exist beside it quietly.
Grief changes your relationship with time, Samah writes, making everything feel both fragile and urgent. Movement feels easier than silence because silence leaves too much room for longing. Sometimes she wonders if she has been running simply so she does not have to fully feel the shape of her mother’s absence.
What remains, she writes, are traces: in the way she soothes her son, in the tenderness her mother taught her, in the instinct to care for others even when your own heart is breaking. Grief has not disappeared. It has simply woven itself quietly into motherhood, memory, and love itself.