Every once in a while, I tear up in a movie.

Today was not one of those days. Today, I nearly had to stifle sobs.

In a children’s movie.

That I’ve already seen once, already.

When we saw Inside Out the first time, I sat with one of my Besties—and she made a point to nudge me about a line uttered by “Sadness.” I knew what she was getting at—but the weird thing was that despite having wrestled with clinical depression much of my life, I found myself, oddly enough, relating the most with “Joy.”

Today, I recognized why.

Because I’ve been haunted by Melancholy for as long as I can remember, I wanted something different for my daughter. For both of my children. And for many years, I did a pretty darn good job. My kids were energetic. Resilient. Cheerful. Friendly. Bubbly. Spastic, some might even say. (Like perhaps a teacher or two… or ten.) What I’m trying to say is that they were FUN—and we had fun together.

Don’t get me wrong—it wasn’t that I attempted to entirely shelter them from pain. Bad things happened to my kids. But we talked through it. We prayed. We processed. And they bounced back… again and again.

But one day, my bouncy girl stopped bouncing.

One day, the mysterious illness that kept cycling through her system decided it was going to settle in indefinitely. And despite three years of our best efforts and tens of thousands of dollars, we still can’t seem to evict it.

I did what I could do. I tried to maintain normal. Hiking and movies and “Wild Wacky Wednesdays” and sleepovers and all the fun things we used to do—the art festival, the fair, the zoo, the fountains, the park. Like Joy, I kept trying to create enough of those yellow capsules to keep things tipped in the happy direction. Like Joy, I was trying to fix this for my daughter. Like Joy, I was growing frantic.

And like Joy, I was failing.

And so when Joy sat in despair grasping her little yellow balls with her eyes filled with tears and looked at them each one by one—images of laughter and giggles and friends and smiles and hugs and silly face—knowing that she might not be able to repair them and said, “I just wanted her to be happy…”

…all I could see was a mess of curly golden brown hair flipping over my couch with a smile bigger than Texas and a spirit that seemed indestructible. And I grieved in the deepest places of my spirit that that happy girl is gone—and like Joy, there’s nothing I can do to fix it.

To say I cried would be an understatement. But today wasn’t that “my babies are growing up and things are changing and I’m nostalgic and sentimental” gathering of tears that my children love to tease me about.

Today, I ached in places I didn’t know I could ache for a child who once brought me so much joy who no longer has any herself—for all the yellow balls that have turned to blue.

I know it is time to allow Sadness to take control of her panel—or, more honestly put, to acknowledge that it already has. And I know this is not something I can fix for her, nor should I if I could. Joy and sadness will mingle throughout her life as they have already—and this is normal. I can accept that, despite that overwhelmingly visceral parental instinct that wants to navigate and protect and soothe and fix. I really can. I can see the maturity and depth and faith growing within her through these difficult years, and I can appreciate their value.

But what I struggled to keep contained today is the grief that overwhelms me because the spark that once lit up my daughter is now nothing but a memory that I get glimpses of in pictures from happier, healthier days—with her curls blowing and her grin reaching from ear to ear and her body in motion and her eyes sparkling…

…and I just can’t help but miss my happy girl.

chronic fatigue chronic pain depression grief motherhood parenting