"You Thought You Had to Choose" by Maria Messer
Summer Season of Letters From A Caregiver
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I’m Victoria. You can read why I’m publishing Carer Mentor here: Who Started Carer Mentor and Why? I created Carer Mentor to offer heartfelt empathy for Caregivers. It’s a hub of practical tools, resources, and insights. A community support network for all of us human-ing hard. ❤️ Start exploring here.
Letters from a Caregiver.
“Letters from a Caregiver” is a weekly article where a caregiver offers their wisdom, compassion, and hope to their younger self. No one knows us as well as we know ourselves, and even then, we may second-guess ourselves. The choices, challenges and tragedies we’ve faced have forged us in more ways than anyone can understand; in ways we’re still trying to decipher!
Since September 2025, thirty-two letters have been posted over three seasons.
This Summer Season so far
Today’s ‘Letter from a Caregiver’ is by Holding Both - Maria Messer
When I read Maria’s ‘Welcome to Holding Both’ article at the end of 2025, I was captured by the grace and permission of her words. We can be many things at once.
I resonated with her remapping of expectations and orientation back to what matters most: love. There’s something about the architecture of her words that creates more space for us to breathe as caregivers and with life in general; we can feel it all, be messy, be wordless and still feel whole.
There are moments that shift our perspective and outlook on life, but when someone we love is involved, our whole world changes. Thank you to Maria, for sharing her letter today.
Read more of Maria’s work:
Full Circle. On teaching, motherhood, and the places that shape us.
Holding Both: When More Than One Truth Lives in the Same Body. Our Caregiving As A Parent network discussion, hosted by Maria.
Author’s Bio: Maria Messer is a writer, speaker, special education leader, and the adoptive mother of two sons, Carter and Mason. She writes Holding Both on Substack — a memoir and essay collection rooted in one hard-won truth: that the realest moments of a life are usually two contradictory things held at once — grief and joy, hope and dread, the child in front of you and the future you imagined. After years of caregiving, advocacy, and slowly learning to offer herself the same compassion she gives everyone else, she writes for fellow caregivers and working parents trying to do the same. She lives in the foothills west of Denver, Colorado. Find her on Substack at Holding Both and on LinkedIn
You Thought You Had to Choose
Dear Maria, fall of 2010,
Stop looking at the monitor for a minute. Sit. Breathe in. Out. Again, breathe in… out.
I know you can’t really sit. I know your whole body is angled toward that crib, listening for the next thing to go wrong. But humor me. I’m you — fifteen years up the road — and I don’t get long, so let me hold your hand the way you wish someone would hold yours right now.
You’re at Children’s Hospital. Day three, maybe four. It began with a shake as he woke from a nap — not a soft newborn startle, something else, something that tightened your chest before your mind could catch up. A 911 call. Then a second seizure no one could stop, and then an emergency flight here. The medications that finally quieted his brain are heavy enough that they’ve taken back the things he only just learned. He can’t sit up. He can’t hold his head steady. He can barely open his eyes. And you are standing over him asking the question that is going to live in your chest for a very long time.
Did permanent damage happen?
I’m not going to answer that. Not because I’m cruel. Because the answer was never the point, and some things you have to live your way into.
Here is what I will tell you.
You walked into this thinking you knew the road. ADHD. Because cocaine. That was the story you wrote — the only one you knew how to tell. ADHD felt manageable. Predictable. Almost ordinary. It came with scripts and strategies and a general sense of what to expect.
Oh, Maria. The story is going to get so much bigger than that.
Not worse. Bigger. You’re going to learn words you don’t have yet — executive function, sensory dysregulation, language disability, autism, epilepsy, generalized anxiety, and others I’m not going to hand you tonight because you don’t need to carry them early. You’re going to become fluent in a language no parent wants to be fluent in. And here’s the part I most need you to hear, the part that took me years:
Carter learning to need all of that does not make him less than the baby in that crib. It makes him more. More than any single word. More than any meeting, any report, any prognosis. He refuses, his whole life, to shrink into one story. So will you, eventually. You’ll just fight it first.
You already know something you don’t know you know.
Last Christmas — Carter barely six weeks old, the snowy parking lot, the county building all lit up, the visit his birth mother didn’t come to. You sat in that cold car and felt two enormous things at once. Devastated and ecstatic. How could she not come for him? and, almost in the same breath, oh — we might actually get to keep him! Grief and hope, neither one erasing the other, both of them true, both of them yours.
You thought that was just a strange, hard moment.
It was a lesson. The first one. Life is going to teach it to you again and again until you finally have language for it, and when you do, it will become the truest thing you know. So I’ll give you the words now, early, as a gift:
Holding both.
You don’t have to choose. You are never going to have to choose. Hold the grief and the joy. The mother and the professional. The love for the child in front of you and the grief for the future you imagined. The certainty you crave and the not-knowing you actually get. Life will not ask you to pick one. It will ask you to hold both — and then hold them again — and then again.
You will. I promise you, you will.
I have to be straight with you, because you’ve always preferred the hard news straight.
There are years coming that are going to break you open. Carter’s name is going to start showing up on incident reports and court dockets. You’re going to sit in rooms and hear words about your son — elopement, aggression, dissociation, non-compliant — that don’t match the sweet, busy, tender boy you know at home. You’ll feel torn down the middle, living in the gap between two Carters, certain one of them must be the lie.
Neither is the lie. They’re the same coin. Same boy. Both true.
And underneath it, there’s going to be a feeling you’ll mistake for shame for a long, long time. The shame of being a special education professional who can’t decode or manage or fix what’s happening in her own house. I should be able to hold this. I do this for a living. You’ll call it exhaustion. You’ll call it confusion. You won’t call it what it is.
It’s grief. Grief for the life you imagined. Grief for the plan. Grief that does not mean you failed — it means you loved something enough to mourn it honestly.
I want to save you the years it takes to learn that. I can’t. You’re going to have to live them. But I can stand on the other side and tell you they end somewhere survivable.
You’ll learn — much later than you’d like — that your body keeps the score whether you want it to or not. That the grief you don’t put down somewhere will find another way out of you. That you are allowed, you are required, to take care of yourself as fiercely as you take care of everyone else. There’s a book coming for that. There’s a meme, of all things, that’s going to bring you to your knees in the best way. There’s a phrase — radical acceptance — that you’re going to resist with everything you have, because accepting feels like quitting, and you have never once quit anything.
Radical acceptance won’t ask you to stop loving him. It’ll ask you to stop pretending that loving him means denying the rest. My child is wonderful. My child has significant needs. Both are true. Both belong. That’s not surrender. That’s expansion.
There’s more I’m not going to tell you.
I won’t tell you about a marriage that bends under a weight no one talks about, or what it costs to leave a life that no longer fits in order to step into one you can’t yet see. I won’t tell you about a second boy who’s coming — you don’t know about Mason yet, and you need to know he’s coming, because he is going to answer a phone on a highway one day when no one else can reach his brother, and he is going to make you laugh when you’ve forgotten how.
And I won’t tell you about a morning, fifteen hundred miles from your son, when you have to do the hardest thing a mother can do, and walk back into a quiet house afterward. I’m leaving that one alone. Not to scare you with mystery — to spare you the counting-down. Things are going to be as they’re meant to be, in their own time.
I’ll only tell you this about it: you survive it. And the quiet you’ll be so afraid of turns out not to be emptiness. It’s something you haven’t felt in years. You are still his mother. The love does not need to be in the same room to be real.
Before there was language, there was love. You’ll write that someday. It will be the truest sentence you know about Carter and you. Keep it.
Now. The reason I really came.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it — the hard years, the unraveling, the rearranging of everything you built — you’re going to sit down and do something you have never done in your life.
You’re going to write yourself a love letter.
It won’t even be your idea. A therapist will hand it to you as an assignment, and you’ll want to roll your eyes — because by then you will have spent your whole life as your own worst critic. You are fluent in the harsh things. You should have known. You should be handling this better. You’re not doing enough. You speak to yourself in a voice you would never, not once, use on someone you love. That is exactly why she gives it to you. Write a letter to yourself, she tells you, the way you’d write to someone you love.
So you do. For the first time in your life, you turn that kinder voice toward yourself. It feels small and enormous at the same time. And I want you to have it now, early, so you know what’s waiting:
The work you have done and are doing is incredible. You are strong, resilient, ambitious, tenacious, tender, loving, patient, and kind. I love who you are becoming and cannot wait to see what the future holds. It is bright and ALL things are possible. You showed up for yourself when you had to. You’re doing the HARD work your body, heart, and soul desperately need. Keep going, you’re worth it!
— Me
Look at what you do in it. You name yourself strong, resilient, ambitious, tenacious — and in the same breath, tender, loving, patient, kind. You don’t separate them. You don’t rank them. You write them in one sentence because they belong to one person.
You.
That letter is real. It’s a beginning. But hear me, because this is the thing I most needed to learn and the thing I most want to hand back to you: a beginning is not an arrival. Worth is not something you’ll discover once and then carry effortlessly into every room and every morning after.
Worth is a practice. Daily. Imperfect. Some days with confidence, some days through gritted teeth. You don’t earn it by holding everything together. You don’t lose it when everything falls apart. You’re worth something not because of what you build but because of who you’re becoming — and you are already, sitting in that hospital chair, becoming her.
So keep doing what you’re doing, love. Listen to the doctors and also to your gut. Call your sister. Make the spaghetti. Borrow the car seat. Say all the I-love-yous, every single one, every chance you get — bottle the delight.
You won’t get all the answers. You’ll learn to live without the map. You’ll stop being so afraid of the gray, because the gray turns out to be where your actual life lives — complicated and tender and full of contradictions you finally stop trying to resolve.
The beauty of gray. It was always the answer. You just have to live your way into it.
And here is the thing I almost didn’t see coming, sitting where you’re sitting tonight: Carter becomes the best teacher you will ever have. Not in spite of all of it — through it. He teaches you, without a single lecture and most of the time without words, how to love your whole life exactly as it is. Before there was language, there was love. He will prove that to you a thousand times.
So this is what he teaches you, in the end. To hold both. You’ll hold the grief and the joy. The mother and the professional. The certainty you wanted and the not-knowing you got. The rest and the devotion. The strength and the tenderness. The love for the child in front of you and the grief for the future you imagined. You’ll stop asking which one is the real one. They both are. You don’t have to choose. You never did.
Hold both. And then hold them again. And then again.
I’m in you and with you, through the pain and the joy that’s coming. And one day, we’ll be the same person, standing in a quiet kitchen with a cup of coffee, still here. Still his mother. Still his student. Still becoming.
If I could leave you with a single word, it would be that one. Stay. Not because it’s easy — because it’s the bravest thing you’ll ever do. You choose this life, and yourself inside it, over and over.
Again. And again. And again.
With everything, Me — today
One last question to close the letter from Victoria.
Please share one quote/movie/book that’s inspired you?
In my early twenties — before I knew anything about anything — I had a line from “The Beauty of Gray” by Live tattooed on me. I loved the song. I loved how it sounded. I had no real idea what it was actually trying to tell me: that the world is not black and white, that a real life is lived in the colors in between, and that the gray is not the absence of an answer — it is the answer. I’ve spent my whole life since living my way into those words. They were a map I couldn’t read yet, inked onto a young woman who still believed she could plan and prepare and achieve her way to certainty. The song knew before I did.
And years later, Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score gave me language for something I’d been living inside without a name. Grief doesn’t stay in the mind. It moves into the body and makes a home there — in the hypervigilance, the exhaustion sleep can’t touch, the bracing you stop noticing because it has become your normal. Eventually the body insists on being heard. Between a song I didn’t understand at twenty and a book that finally explained me decades later, I learned the same lesson twice: pay attention to what you’re carrying, and where you carry it.
Prompt for discussion:
Who in your life has taught you something real without ever using words?
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Beautiful article. Thank you for sharing.
A quote o often come back to is, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It reminds me to stop focusing on what’s already happened and fearing what lies ahead. Instead, I focus on my inner strength and inner peace.
Your write: "Worth is not something you’ll discover once and then carry effortlessly into every room and every morning after.
Worth is a practice. Daily. Imperfect. Some days with confidence, some days through gritted teeth. You don’t earn it by holding everything together. You don’t lose it when everything falls apart."
This seems a universal truth, especially for those who navigate the choppy waters of caregiving. With love, even when that doesn't feel like enough.
Thank you for such beautiful writing! Take care.