Holding Both: When More Than One Truth Lives in the Same Body
Caregiving As A Parent network discussion
I'm Maria, creator of Holding Both — a Substack space where I write about motherhood, disability, grief, love, and the long, slow practice of letting more than one truth be true at the same time. I'm a mom through adoption, a special education leader, and a person who has spent most of her adult life inside systems built for complex kids — including, eventually, my own. My son Carter is sixteen, complex and the most patient teacher I have ever had. I'm grateful to be part of this Carer Mentor collaboration, and grateful to sit alongside this team of parent caregivers, each of whom carries their own version of what it means to hold both.
A few months ago, I met Victoria and was introduced to her website, Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration. It’s full of practical tools, thoughtful resources, and insights that truly meet caregivers where they are.
What I appreciate most is how intentional she is about connection. Victoria isn’t just sharing information—she’s helping us find each other. She’s building something that feels like a community, where caregivers can feel supported, understood, and a little less alone.
Meet the team
Holding Both: When More Than One Truth Lives in the Same Body
Hi friends, I’m Maria. Thank you to Victoria for inviting our team to host these monthly “Ask Us Anything” conversations for caregivers who are parents — and thank you to everyone who showed up in our first thread on April 3rd. The honesty in those comments, the way you held space for one another’s very different stories, has stayed with me.
For this month’s discussion, I want to sit with a phrase that has carried me through the hardest seasons of my life as Carter’s mom.
Holding both.
*
When I think about caregiving — especially caregiving as a parent — I keep coming back to this. We are so often asked, implicitly or explicitly, to pick a lane. Are you grieving or grateful? Hopeful or realistic? Strong or struggling? Coping or falling apart? Pick one. Resolve it. Tell us where you’ve landed.
Most of us cannot land anywhere. We are living in motion. We are holding more than one truth at the same time.
The first time I remember feeling this — really feeling it — was Christmas 2009. My son Carter was six weeks old. He had been placed with us through foster care, and his birth mother was scheduled for a visit at the county offices that night. I dropped him off and drove around in the dark, watching snow fall on Christmas lights, waiting.
She didn’t show.
I sat in my car in shock. And inside me, two things happened at the exact same time. I was devastated — how could she not come, does she even love him? And I was flooded with something I had not let myself feel until that moment — oh. We might actually get to keep him.
Grief and hope. Heartbreak and joy. Both arrived together. Neither cancelled the other out.
I didn’t have language for it then. I just knew I felt all of it at once and somehow I was still okay.
That moment turned out to be the beginning of an education that has not stopped.
*
Carter is now sixteen. He is tender, funny, anxious, loving, and endlessly human. He also has autism, an intellectual disability, and ADHD. His life — and ours — has not unfolded in any of the ways I once imagined. He recently returned from a season in a residential treatment facility fifteen hundred miles from our home. He’s now living in a group home in the area. The road that brought us there was long, and parts of it broke me open.
What I want to tell you is this: even now, especially now, I am holding more than one truth at the same time.
I am grieving the version of motherhood where my son lived under my roof. And I am relieved he is somewhere safe.
I am missing him in my bones. And I am sleeping through the night for the first time in years.
I am proud of the long, hard advocacy that got him to the right place. And I am quietly furious that we had to advocate that hard to get there at all.
I am letting myself rest. And I am preparing for whatever comes next.
None of these cancel each other out. None of them mean I love him any less. None of them mean I am doing it wrong.
They mean I am human. They mean love and limitation live in the same body.
*
Here is what I have learned, slowly and reluctantly:
Grief is not nearly as polite as we have been told. It does not only show up at funerals or with sympathy cards or socially recognized losses. It shows up anywhere love meets limitation. Anywhere longing meets reality. Anywhere the life you imagined brushes up against the life you are actually living.
Loving a child whose path is different from what we pictured is not, in itself, a tragedy. But it does come with grief. Quiet, ongoing, hard-to-name grief. Not because we wish for a different child — God, no — but because we are human, and we imagined deeply, and the imagining doesn’t just disappear because reality looks different.
Joy doesn’t disappear either. It still shows up in laughter at the kitchen table, in the wink across a crowded room, in the small triumphs no one outside our walls would understand.
Both belong. Both stay. I am no longer interested in resolving them.
*
What holding both has given me is permission.
Permission to stop pretending I feel only one thing. Permission to stop performing acceptance I haven’t fully reached, or hope I don’t fully feel. Permission to let grief and gratitude sit at the same table without making either one apologize for being there.
I do not have to choose. Life is not asking me to choose. It is asking me to hold both, and then to hold them again, and then again.
You can love deeply and grieve at the same time. You can be exhausted and grateful in the same breath. You can fight with everything you have and learn when to let go. You can know too much and still miss things. You can be the person who holds it all together for everyone else, and the person who falls apart in the car afterward.
All of it is true. All of it belongs.
You don’t have to be strong here. You don’t have to know what comes next. You don’t have to resolve anything. You only have to be willing to sit with more than one truth at a time.
That is enough. That has always been enough.
*
I would love to hear from our team of parent caregivers — each of whom is holding their own version of this — and from readers, wherever you are in your caregiving journey. Whether you are caring for a child, a parent, a partner, a sibling, or someone you have chosen as family, the experience of holding more than one truth is universal. There is no neat way to say it. There is no right answer. Your truth, in whatever messy, contradictory, deeply human form, belongs here.
Today’s prompt for discussion:
What two truths are you holding right now in your caregiving? And what feels hardest about letting both of them be true at the same time?
Share your thoughts or ideas
Reply to each other’s comments/questions
Explore ways to share, connect, and collaborate together.
Let’s remember that what works for one person may not work for someone else. Let’s lead with empathy.
I’m so glad you’re here. I’d love to invite others into the conversation—what truths are you holding right now in your caregiving, and what feels hardest about letting both be true at the same time? Share as much or as little as you’d like.
I love this prompt so much. I just told a friend this morning that I do not know how to hold my deep love for my child alongside the weight of what these years have carried.
I am an adoptive mom of kids who came from trauma, and we have navigated challenging behavior and mental illness for what feels like a thousand years. I love our kids, who are now adults. I have advocated for them, honored and acknowledged the effects of trauma and mental illness on their lives. I have held space, imperfectly, for all of that. I have loved them through it all.
But I do not know how to hold space for my own trauma — for what these years have done to me. Even as I write this, I want to delete it, because it feels selfish to acknowledge my own pain when they have carried so much more.
I said to my husband recently: You can love a child deeply and still be undone by them. Still be changed by them. Still be wounded by the years of it. I do not know how to hold both. But I am learning to simply acknowledge what is true about me today.
I practice this by writing what I call my one true sentence each morning. What is true about me today? I sit with it. I do not try to solve it or rush to conclusions or judgments. I just sit with it.
When I work with other caregivers of kids with challenging behaviors, we talk about a reframe on the old stop, drop, and roll we learned as kids. Instead, I invite them into stop, turn, and love — stop and pause when things are hard, take a breath, then turn toward love. I am imperfectly learning that that turning needs to be directed at myself, as well