I’m writing this at night, after everyone is finally asleep, with the glass of water I forgot about three times today.
April was a lot. Beautiful, fun, and hard and emotional and exhausting in a way that sleep is still not fixing. I have three kids — nine, seven, and two — and last month every single one of them needed me in a different way, at the same time, with everything I had. Some days I gave it. Some days I gave what I didn’t have. Some days the morning was hard and we went outside, touched grass, took a deep exhale, looked at the clouds with some hot cocoa, and called it good.
That’s actually the whole philosophy. But we’ll get there.
What I want to tell you first is that I showed up for my life in April in a way I haven’t needed to in a long time. For my kids. For my husband. For my home. For my notebook at midnight when the house was quiet and I had nothing left to give except the truth. None of it was documented. None of it made the grid or here. All of it was real. All of it filled me back up in a way that no amount of visibility ever has.
That’s the theme this month. Just Show Up. For your life. For your people. For the version of yourself that exists when nobody is watching and nothing is being performed.
My nine year old had a burnout week.
He chose public school this year, his seven year old brother homeschools with me, which I’ll write about properly another time because that story deserves its own space, and he has been genuinely thriving in it. Friends. A teacher he loves. Obsessed with the school library in a way that makes my book-loving heart want to weep with joy. Eight solid months of choosing that world every single morning and loving it.
Not performing happy. Actually happy.
And then one week he couldn’t stop crying and couldn’t tell me why. Just: I’m tired, Mom. I don’t know. I’m just tired.
He has PDA autism. Which means his nervous system processes the world at a volume most people never have to deal with, and even the things he loves draw from a tank that needs regular refilling. He wasn’t struggling in secret. He was fully, joyfully in it. He just ran out of fuel. If you have a child with autism, you already know what I mean. The crash doesn’t cancel the good months. It just means he gave everything he had to something he loved and his body finally said: we need a week.
I had a toddler, a seven year old who still needed his lessons, and a nine year old in his room with the lights off, crying, and I was running on fumes. So I did what any self-respecting woman who has done years of personal development and inner work and cycle-breaking does in a crisis.
I called my mom.
Sobbing.
Which is unlike me. I’m the eldest daughter, I’m the one she calls, not the other way around.
She came. No questions asked.
I explained autism burnout to her. What it looks like, what it isn’t, what he needed. And what he needed was simple: someone to sit with him in the dark and not try to fix it. No lights. No pep talk. No you’re okay, stop crying, what is wrong with you. Just presence. Just another body in the room saying I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, you don’t have to explain yourself to me.
I watched my mother walk into that dark room and sit down next to my son.
And I stood in the hallway and fell apart.
Because I was that kid once. Crying and not knowing why. Feeling everything too loudly and not being able to turn the volume down. And I was called dramatic. Emotional. Too much. Nobody sat with me in the dark. Nobody told me I didn’t have to explain it.
My mom didn’t know then what she knows now. She knows now because I taught her. Because I did the work, read the books, broke the cycles, sat in the therapy chairs and somewhere in that decade of becoming, I handed her a new language and she learned it.
She learned it for him. She learned it for me, thirty years late, and somehow right on time.
Watching her sit quietly in that room, not trying to fix him, just being there, I felt something in my chest unknot that I didn’t even know was knotted.
Three generations in one dark room. Completely undocumented. Completely everything.
And here is the part I did not expect.
My son, in the middle of his hardest week, still pulled himself out of that room to make his two brothers laugh. He made a cake for his cousins. Not because anyone asked. Not because he was performing okay. Just because that is who he is. Running on empty and still showing up for his little brothers & family without even thinking about it.
That wrecked me in the best way.
Because showing up doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be documented or witnessed or impressive. It doesn’t have to look like anything from the outside at all. My mom showed up. My husband showed up. My sons showed up. I showed up for all of them and then I showed up for myself, in the small quiet undocumented ways that somehow end up being the most important ones.
A bad moment doesn’t ruin the whole day. A hard week doesn’t erase eight months of thriving. You touch grass. You drink something warm. You tell your kid and yourself: this moment is hard, and this moment is not forever. And then you try again tomorrow.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Life is worth living if showing up and experiencing it is the entire point. Not curating it. Not optimizing it. Not performing it. Just being in it, fully, with the people in your actual room.
So that’s what May looks like here.
No Mother’s Day hauls. No affiliate links. No perfectly timed summer content. Just me, showing up with what I have left after a month of being needed constantly, emotionally, relentlessly, and lovingly, which is my notebooks and the humble, honest poems I wrote in them when I had nothing else to give.
Every Friday this month I’m dropping one. A poem from April. Not polished. Not strategic. Just true. Each one comes with a digital print you can download and keep. Something for your wall, your journal, your nightstand on the hard nights. A small reminder that the unwitnessed moments count. The dark rooms count. The cold coffee and the grass and the hot cocoa and the trying again tomorrow, all of it counts.
You don’t have to perform your life to deserve it.
Just show up. That’s the whole assignment.
you don’t have to document it to deserve it.
you don’t have to share it to make it real.
you don’t have to be witnessed
to have truly shown up.
just be there.
that’s the whole thing.
With so much love,
Jazmin Montero
Such a good reminder that just showing up, especially in the quiet moments, really is enough.