f you have been crying in your closet, your car, or your bathroom lately and you cannot quite explain why, this post is for you.
I just published the podcast episode I have been needing to record for about a year. It is about the quiet grief moms feel at every single year of high school. Not just senior year. Every year. And nobody warns you it is coming.
Hit play below. Or scroll through the written version. Or both. Whatever you need today.
Why This Episode, Now
Last week a mom emailed me about her senior. About how he had skipped most of the senior year milestones. No prom. No senior trip. No senior anything. She wrote it on her phone, in her car, after a senior event she did not attend because he did not want her there.
I wrote her back the longest reply I have written in months. Because what she was carrying was not just senior year. It was four years of quiet grief that piled up on her one Tuesday in May and finally cracked.
Senior year just happens to be the year people notice it.
But the grief is at every single grade. Let me walk you through what each one looks like, so the next time it shows up in your kitchen you know what to call it.
9th Grade Grief: Losing Access
The 9th grade grief is the grief of being on the outside of their day.
You used to know everything. The teachers, the friends, the lunch table seating arrangement, the kid on the bus who said something mean. Now you ask “how was your day” and you get “fine.” That is the whole conversation.
You also lose elementary school. No more class parties you attend. No more pickup line where you see other moms. No more parent-teacher conference where the teacher knows your kid as a whole person.
Your child is starting to have a private life. That is what is supposed to happen. And you are still allowed to miss the old version.
The reframe: their world is getting bigger. The grief is what proves you raised them well enough to step into it.
10th Grade Grief: Watching Them Become Themselves
Sophomore year is the year the grief catches you off guard.
You were braced for 9th. You will be braced for 12th. The middle years sneak up on you.
The 10th grade grief is identity-shift grief. The friend group shifted. The clothes shifted. The way they talk to you shifted. Maybe the politics. Maybe the music. Maybe the gender expression. Maybe everything.
You can feel like you do not know your own kid anymore. That is not because you are losing them. That is because they are building who they are going to be, and you are not the architect of that build anymore.
The reframe: you are a contributor instead of a creator now. Still on the team. Not running the project.
11th Grade Grief: Realizing They Are Leaving
This is the year you stop being able to pretend that college is not happening.
Standardized tests, college visits, the weight of “what’s next.” All at once.
The grief here is sneaky in a specific way. This is when you start to actually realize they are leaving.
The first time it hits is usually on a college tour. You are sitting in a campus parking lot two states away. You watch them walk ahead of you on the tour. And you think: oh. Oh no. They are actually going to do this. They are actually going to leave.
That is grief. The grief of becoming a smaller character in their story.
It also brings up every parenting decision you ever made coming back as a tiny anxious bell ringing in your head that you cannot make stop. Should I have pushed harder. Should I have pushed less. Should I have made them take more APs. Should I have let them quit soccer.
The reframe: none of those questions have answers. The grief is just there. You can let it be there without solving for it.
12th Grade Grief: The Year of One Thousand Last Things
Senior year is the year everyone tells you will be hard. They are right and they are also wrong. The hard part is not always what you think it will be.
The grief at 12th comes in waves. Sometimes it is the milestone that happens. Sometimes it is the milestone that does not happen. Sometimes it is the milestone that happens but your kid hated it.
Permission slip from me to you: if your senior is doing the milestones, cry at all of them. If your senior is not doing the milestones, cry about the ones that are not happening. Either way. Cry in your closet, your car, your bathroom. It counts.
Here is what nobody says out loud about 12th grade grief. The grief is not really about the milestones. The grief is about the closing of a chapter you have been writing for 18 years. The milestones are just the markers of the chapter ending.
When you cry at the senior banquet, you are not crying about the banquet. You are crying because there will not be another one.
You are grieving the daily-ness of them.
What Actually Helps
A few things that help when the grief shows up.
Name it. Do not try to talk yourself out of it by saying “I should not be sad about this, other moms have it worse.” Naming the grief makes it manageable.
Do not make your kid responsible for your grief. They did not do anything wrong by growing up. Talk to a friend, a therapist, a sister, your mom, the dog. Not your senior the night before graduation.
Find one ritual that is just yours. Mine is a folder on my phone called “Jake at home.” When I miss him I scroll through.
Talk to other moms who are in it. Collective grief is much lighter than private grief. Saying “I cried in my closet last week” to another mom and her saying “me too” takes the weight off in a way nothing else does.
Remember the grief is the cost of having raised them well. If you did not love them this much, this would not hurt this much. The hurt is proof of the work.
You Are Going to Be Okay
The grief is real. The grief is sneaky. The grief is at every single year of high school, not just the obvious ones. And the grief is allowed.
You do not need to fix it. You do not need to talk your kid into a milestone they do not want. You do not need to do anything. You just need to feel it, name it, share it with someone who gets it, and let your kid keep being themselves.
Your kid is going to be okay. You are going to be okay. The grief is the price you pay for having mattered this much. It is worth every penny.
If your kid is heading into senior year and the personal statement is the thing sitting in the back of your worry brain, my Personal Statement Huddle is open through Thursday at midnight. Four students per cohort, four weeks on Zoom, finished essay by the end of June. May 31 cohort fills first. After that your spot rolls to late June or late July. $500 alone, $900 bundled with the August Common App College Huddle.
Already in my Dream Team or Parent Collective? You are covered. Dream Team families get the personal statement done one-on-one with me as part of our work together. Collective members have a dedicated essay group inside the membership. The Huddle is for moms who are not in either room yet.
→ Enroll in the Personal Statement Huddle
If you want a place to talk through any of this with other moms who are in it, the Parent Collective is the room.
And if this one hit, my Friday blog on end-of-year burnout drops in two days. It pairs really well with this one.
