When Grace Meets Grief

Learning to Breathe Through the Hard Days of Parenthood After Loss

Cradling my daughter, I felt the weight of her tiny body melt into my chest. Her balled fist clung tightly to my shirt as she drifted into sleep, her soft snores punctuating the quiet rhythm of the rocking chair. I snapped a photo of her hand — a simple image to capture a moment that meant everything.

It was a small piece of what it means to be a parent to a living, breathing child. And in that instant, I wept.

To many, a baby clutching their parent’s shirt might not seem remarkable. But to me — a father of loss, twice over — it was the culmination of four years of prayers, heartbreak, and hope.

A few days before that photo, though, I faced what I can honestly call the hardest morning of my parenting life so far. My wife had just left for work, leaving me at home with our daughter — and my own full workload waiting on the other side of the living room wall. It was the plan we had agreed upon to avoid the impossible cost of daycare, and for the most part, it had been working.

That morning started like any other: wake up, make breakfast, prepare a bottle, and settle into our routine. My wife had already pumped for the day, kissed us both goodbye, and left. I began rocking our daughter for her nap, the same way I had every morning since we brought her home from the NICU.

But she wasn’t having it.

She cried with a desperation that pierced through every part of me. The kind of crying where nothing helps — not the pacifier, not the bottle, not the rocking, humming, or gentle shushing. Just unrelenting tears.

As her cries grew louder, so did the noise in my mind — the emails chiming, the Teams messages pinging, my own heartbeat racing. I felt dysregulated and overwhelmed, drowning in frustration and guilt. I told myself I should be grateful, patient, strong. After all, I had prayed for this — for her. But in that moment, I felt like I was failing her, and worse, failing the promise I made to myself after loss: to embrace every part of parenthood, no matter how hard.

It reminded me of marriage vows — “for better or for worse.” Those words are easy to say when everything feels right, but the real test comes when life demands that you live them. After losing our first son, a close friend told us, “This will either break your marriage or forge it into something unshakable.” We stood on that knife’s edge once, unsure which way we’d fall.

Before our daughter came along, we often told ourselves that nothing — no hardship, no exhaustion — could diminish our gratitude. But that morning tested those convictions. For a fleeting moment, I wanted to give up, to step outside the room and just walk away from the overwhelm. And then, just as quickly, I felt the crushing guilt of that thought.

Because we had begged for this. Because some parents still are.

When the storm finally broke, and her cries softened into hiccups, I realized she had calmed only after I did. I pulled her close again, and she looked up at me — eyes wide, lips curling into a gummy little smile — and then let out the sweetest coo I’d ever heard.

And I wept.

In that tiny moment of peace, everything realigned. The frustration faded, replaced by something gentler: grace. Grace for myself. Grace for the process. Grace for the truth that parenthood, even when longed for and hard-won, is still hard.

I’m still learning how to parent. We all are. But I’m also learning that love doesn’t erase the hard days — it simply gives them purpose. And that’s enough to keep going.