Life can be crazy, we juggle so many things but we often forget to look after ourselves, leaving what should be the most important thing as an afterthought. Some of us at some point in our lives go through big life changing events and everyone has muliple daily small events that build up, taking refuge in our brain. Without a coping mechanism or a way of release, this build up can start to affect our mood, and who we are as a person.

My personal journey has given me some quite big events that I’ve had to learn to deal with, grief being one of them. It doesn’t just go away or get better because it’s like a small consistent hum in the background of my life. Without knowing how to support myself when the humming gets loud, I wouldn’t be able to function as a parent or as a person.

I lost my best friend, my mum, coming up to 4 years ago. That date as it approaches hangs in the air and can make me struggle to catch my breath at times, but its not just that date, its birthdays and mothers day, Christmas and every other little date that I found significant to our relationship.

In fact my grief started 2 years and 9 months prior to her passing, when the doctors said she had 6 months to live. This time in my life, I was building a business, a cake business in Windsor, I had 2 children under 6 yrs old, one of which was going through some challenging times at school, with an autism diagnosis being fought for. Caner doesn’t care about what’s going on, it hits with a vicious venom and destroys everything in its path. With chemotherapy, holistic healing and therapies, and a whole bucket of her positivity she lived much longer than was diagnosed, but we knew her time would come at some point and many times we thought it was imminent for her to bounce back up. I can’t even begin to explain how this affected me, but it took me two years to finally ask for help.

Everyone’s grief is unique, no one person will fully understand how it is affecting you because each situation is different, even for example, my grief compared to my sisters. You would assume it’s the same because we both lost our mum, however everyone has their own unique relationship with people, their own ways of processing things and their own set of needs.

How do I cope? Some days honestly I don’t feel like I am, however these are the things I do when I get that deep gut feeling of sadness.