I turned 40 and lost my mother four days later.

She had found her illness in August. She was gone by November.

That kind of loss doesn't ask permission. It doesn't give you time to prepare. It arrives and it rearranges everything — who you are, what you want, what actually matters.

In those months of caring for her, of loving her toward the great beyond, I felt something I struggle to put into words. The closest I can come to it is this: I touched the source of something. The loop of creation. The thread that connects every woman who has ever loved and lost and been loved in return.

My mother was magical. She still is. And before she left, I asked her one thing:

Mom — please go find me a good soul on the other side that will let me be their mother, and love them on this side as much as you loved me.

She heard me. She just made me wait seven years.

I want to tell you about those seven years — because if you are reading this, you may know them too.

The birthdays that came and went. The fertility treatments. The trigger shots. The financial math that never quite added up to IVF. The partner who needed time. The ovulation sticks — so many ovulation sticks. The cycle app. The thermometer. (Mine has the word MOM on it. The universe has a sense of humor.)

The acupuncture appointments every week. The special teas from my doctor at TCM Healing Center in Santa Monica — teas I gagged on, dutifully, hopefully, week after week.

The praying. The candle burning. The ancestor work. The whispered wishes sent into the universe until one day I finally had to let it all go.

It seemed it would never come.

And then it did.

I was on the last season of Grace and Frankie. I was 8 days late. I had just come back from Nashville, where my Mimi had looked at me and said you look different.

My Mimi is a magical one too.

I took the test on an early morning before the world woke up.

Positive.

I was 47 years old. I was pregnant. And I had absolutely no idea what was coming.

I pictured the Instagram version. The warm glow. The snuggled newborn. The effortless joy.

What I got was real. A high-risk pregnancy. Gestational diabetes. A body doing the most extraordinary thing it had ever been asked to do.

She arrived by C-section on a late April morning in 2022. Six pounds, ten ounces. Perfect.

And then the hormones crashed.

Six months later I went back to work. I cried on my first day. I pumped in bathrooms. I showed up to sets where the camera doesn't wait — not for stars, and certainly not for below-the-line workers who just became mothers for the first time at 47.

That's matrescence. That's what nobody named for me when I needed it most.

I am 52 years old. My daughter is four. I am still in matrescence. I am still becoming.

I became a coach because I know the terrain.