Getting laid off felt like being tossed off a moving train. One minute, I was on it. I had a job, a routine, people I talked to every week, work I knew how to do, and some idea of where my career was going.

Then suddenly, I wasn’t. And the train kept moving.

I think that’s one of the strangest things about a layoff. Something pretty significant has just happened to you, but the rest of the world keeps moving. Your bills are still due. Your kids still wake up in the morning. People still ask what’s for dinner. Birthdays still happen. Trips still happen. Laundry achieves immortality. Life does not stop and respectfully give you a few weeks to have an existential crisis.

There really isn’t a prettier way for me to describe that season.

I knew I needed to get back out there quickly, so I did. Interviewing for roles that felt horizontal, or sometimes like I was working hard just to get back to where I’d already been was incredibly humbling. You take years of experience and squeeze them into carefully rehearsed answers. You smile. You explain why you’re excited about the opportunity. You answer the same questions over and over. You make it through multiple rounds. You start imagining that maybe this one is going somewhere.

And then sometimes you get the rejection, 10 minutes later. LOL.Gotta love AI! Or worse, silence.

And the next morning? You get up and do it again.

The first 3 of my interviews happened in Arizona. Yes, I still primarily  live in Missouri so let me explain. I had a trip to Arizona planned around that time, and I seriously considered canceling it. Part of me thought: How am I supposed to go on vacation right now? Technically it was a graduation that we were making a trip out of because i am not hauling my 15000 kids across state lines to return with no memories. Ummm yuck.

I didn’t have a job. I was interviewing. I was anxious. I didn’t exactly feel carefree. But I went. And there I was, trying to enjoy this beautiful trip while disappearing to interview for jobs in between. It’s funny looking back at pictures from that season because pictures don’t tell you what’s happening inside someone’s head. You can be standing somewhere beautiful and still be scared. You can laugh and mean it, and still be worried about what happens when you get home. You can have a genuinely good day in the middle of a genuinely terrible season.

I sometimes resent being a grown up because everyday i gotta hold more that one conflicting feeling at a go and be okay. I feel like its all we do.I wanted to be happy. I wanted to keep everyone’s spirits up. More than anything, I wanted to actually be there. Because I’ve realized that I don’t want to become someone who is only present for my life when life is going well. Parenting taught me that.

Before having children, I think it was easier to disappear into whatever I was going through. If I was disappointed, I could sit in disappointment. If work was stressful, work could consume the day. If my heart was broken, maybe everything else could wait. Motherhood doesn’t really work like that.

My children don’t know that an interview didn’t go well. They don’t understand layoffs or career uncertainty or adult disappointment. They just know Mommy is here.And I have learned that sometimes I have to rise above the chaos of my own life long enough to be present in theirs.

That doesn’t mean pretending I’m okay when I’m not. It doesn’t mean never crying, never being disappointed or forcing myself to find a lesson in something that simply hurts. It means remembering that even on one of the worst days of my year, it might be an ordinary Tuesday in my child’s childhood.

And I don’t want to miss all the ordinary Tuesdays. So I kept showing up. Sometimes with a shattered heart. Sometimes after another rejection. Sometimes worried about money or my career or what came next. Sometimes smiling because something was genuinely funny even though I’d cried earlier that day.

I showed up for bedtime. For meals. For little conversations. For trips. For the million tiny things children ask you to look at that seem completely insignificant until you realize that, to them, they aren’t.

“Mommy, look.”

I’m looking.

That’s the person I want to be.

Not someone who never falls apart. Not someone who handles every season beautifully. But someone who doesn’t postpone her entire life waiting for the painful season to end.

Eventually, I got another wonderful job. And yes, I’m grateful. But strangely, getting the job isn’t the part of this story that stays with me most.

It’s Arizona. It’s interviewing when I would have much rather been doing literally anything else. It’s rejection. It’s uncertainty. It’s looking at my children and realizing that life was happening right then, not after I found another job. Not after I felt better. Not after everything made sense again.

Right then.

I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking presence would be easier once things settled down. Once I accomplished this. Once I got through that. Once the hard thing passed. But there will always be something. A disappointment. A career change. A loss. A season you didn’t ask for. Something that breaks your heart while the rest of your life keeps asking you to participate.

I’m learning to participate anyway. To laugh when something is funny, even during a terrible week. To take the trip. To make the memory. To let my children pull me into whatever tiny thing feels enormous to them. To be sad when I’m sad, and still notice my life happening around me.

Because I don’t only want to be present for the good seasons.

I want to be a present person in all of them.

Even when my heart is shattered.

Especially then.