My Children Didn’t Need a Perfect Mom. They Needed a Mom Willing to Lead Again.

What It’s Been Like as a Mom Navigating Dating After Loss

 

If there’s one question I’ve been asked more than any other since sharing about Raymond, it’s this:

“What did your kids think?”

Honestly?

It’s a fair question.

In fact, it was the same question I wrestled with long before anyone else ever asked it.

Before there was a first date.

Before there was a conversation with my children.

Before there was a blog post.

Before there was a photo.

Before there was a Raymond.

There was just me, sitting with the Lord and asking the same question over and over again:

“God… what about my kids?”

As a mom, nothing mattered more to me.

Not my happiness.

Not whether I would ever love again.

Not what people online might think.

My greatest concern was the hearts of the four people God entrusted to me.

After losing their dad, I knew this wasn’t a decision that would affect only me. Whatever came next would touch all of us.

But even as I say that, I need to make something clear.

While this season has affected my children, their stories still belong to them.

I have chosen to share my journey because I believe God can use our testimonies to bring hope to others. But I have never believed that calling gives me permission to expose someone else’s private thoughts, conversations, or struggles.

Those things belong to my children.

If they choose to share their experiences one day, I will be the loudest person cheering them on. But that decision will always be theirs, not mine.

What I can share is my perspective as their mom and what God has been teaching me through this season.

Because this chapter hasn’t only changed the way I think about dating.

It has changed the way I think about motherhood.

For a long time after Quintin passed away, surviving was our only goal.

We leaned on one another.

We carried one another.

We cried together.

We laughed when we could.

We simply tried to make it through the next day.

And somewhere along the way, without realizing it, I stopped seeing myself primarily as the one leading our family. I began seeing myself as someone trying to survive right alongside my children.

For that season, it was exactly what we needed.

But God, in His kindness, began showing me something I had not fully understood:

Surviving and thriving are not the same thing.

My children didn’t need a perfect mom.

They didn’t need a mom who never cried or never questioned herself.

They didn’t need a mom who always knew what to do.

They needed a mom who kept seeking Jesus.

A mom willing to listen.

A mom willing to apologize.

A mom willing to ask for wisdom.

And ultimately, a mom willing to lovingly lead again.

Not because every step would be easy, but because God never asked me to have every answer.

He simply asked me to trust Him with the next faithful step.

So if you are reading this as a widow, a single parent, someone whose family has changed in ways you never imagined, or even as an adult child trying to understand a parent’s new chapter, I hope you will read it with this in mind:

This isn’t really a story about dating.

It’s a story about learning to lead again after loss.

Sometimes the bravest thing a parent can do is gently lead their family toward hope.

And sometimes the greatest act of love is protecting the stories that aren’t ours to tell.

This Story Didn’t Begin With Raymond

If you’ve followed my journey on CrazyBusyMama.com, then you know this story didn’t begin when I met Raymond.

It began the day my world fell apart.

It continued through the days when I wondered if I would ever smile again.

It grew through the prayers, the waiting, the tears, the counseling, and the quiet work God was doing in my heart when no one else could see it.

If you’ve read stories like “Waiting Isn’t Wasted,” “Learning to Dance Again,” “Can You Love Again After Losing Your Spouse?” or “I Almost Never Met Raymond: The Story God Was Writing Before I Was Ready ,” then you have watched this journey unfold one surrendered step at a time.

Those stories were never really about dating.

They were about healing.

They were about learning to trust God again.

They were about discovering that grief changes us, but it does not have to define the rest of our lives.

This blog is simply the next chapter.

Not because dating is the whole story.

But because motherhood has been at the center of it.

While God was healing my heart, He was also faithfully caring for the hearts of my children.

Honestly, that journey deserves to be handled with prayer, honesty, and great care.

Every Child Grieves Differently

One of the greatest lessons grief has taught me is that there is no single “right” way to walk through it.

There is no perfect roadmap.

There is no universal timeline.

And there certainly isn’t one response that fits every child—even children growing up in the same home and grieving the same parent.

People have asked me, “How did your children handle you dating again?”

The honest answer is:

Each one handled it differently.

Just as each one had a different relationship with their dad, each one carries his memory and processes his absence in a different way.

One child encouraged me before I was ready to even consider the possibility.

Another wrestled with what a changing future might look like.

One wanted me to be happy while quietly processing emotions of their own.

Another has had to adjust to sharing my time after years of our family functioning in survival mode.

None of those responses are wrong.

They are rooted in love.

They are rooted in loss.

And they have reminded me that healing rarely happens at the same pace for everyone.

There have been moments when one of my children reacted strongly to this new chapter. There have also been moments when another offered incredible encouragement.

Both can be true.

A child can support their mom and still struggle with what her next chapter means for them.

Hope and heartbreak can exist in the same heart.

I’ve seen that in my own family.

That is why I have chosen to be careful about what I share.

My children deserve the same grace, privacy, and room to process that I hoped people would give me after Quintin passed away.

Some stories are meant to be shared.

Others are meant to be protected.

As parents, we don’t just protect our children physically.

We protect their hearts.

Sometimes that means standing beside them.

Sometimes it means gently leading them.

And sometimes it means keeping parts of their journey between them and God until they are ready to tell their own story.

From Survival to Thriving

For a long time after Quintin passed away, our family was simply trying to survive.

If you’ve experienced deep loss, you probably understand that kind of season.

Survival doesn’t wait until you are ready.

It doesn’t ask whether you have caught your breath.

It simply asks:

“What is the next thing?”

So that is what we did.

We got up.

We went to school.

We showed up to games and activities.

We celebrated birthdays and walked through holidays.

We learned how to laugh again without feeling guilty.

Some days, we did well.

Other days, making it to bedtime felt like a victory.

But we kept moving.

During that season, something beautiful happened.

We became incredibly close.

We cried together.

We prayed together.

We held one another up.

Sometimes I carried my children.

And sometimes, if I’m honest, they carried me.

There were days they wrapped their arms around me when I couldn’t stop crying.

Days they made me laugh when I didn’t think laughter was possible.

Days their presence reminded me that I still had a reason to get up and keep going.

I will always treasure the ways we loved one another through those darkest days.

But eventually, I began to recognize something.

Without meaning to, the lines between us had started to blur.

We weren’t simply a mother leading her children through grief.

We had become teammates in survival.

For a season, that closeness was a gift from God.

I don’t look back on it with regret.

I look back with gratitude.

But somewhere along the way, I felt the Lord gently reminding me:

“Survival got you here, but I did not call you to stay here.”

That was difficult to receive because survival had become familiar.

It was who we had learned to be.

But God was not asking us to forget where we had been.

He was inviting us to trust Him with where He was leading us next.

My children did not need me to remain frozen in the hardest chapter of our lives.

They needed their mom.

Not another person asking them to help carry a burden that belonged on God’s shoulders.

Not a perfect mom.

Not a mom who never doubted herself.

But a mom willing to keep seeking Jesus and trusting Him enough to lead.

My calling as a mother did not end when I became a widow.

If anything, it became more important.

Learning to Lead Again

One of the hardest lessons God has been teaching me has very little to do with dating and everything to do with motherhood.

There is a difference between honoring my children’s grief and allowing their grief to become the leader of our family.

Those are not the same thing.

For a long time, I didn’t know where that line was.

I wanted to protect my children.

I wanted them to feel heard.

I wanted them to know their emotions mattered.

And they do.

Their grief matters.

Their questions matter.

Their fears matter.

Their hearts matter.

I want our home to remain a safe place for tears, honesty, difficult conversations, and questions that do not always have easy answers.

But listening to my children does not mean asking them to carry decisions they were never meant to carry.

There were moments when I wanted everyone to be completely comfortable before taking another step.

But then I realized that if I waited until grief no longer hurt, until every question had an answer, and until every heart felt completely healed, we might never move forward.

Grief doesn’t work that way.

It changes.

It softens.

It grows alongside hope.

But it does not simply disappear.

Honoring my children’s grief means listening.

It means slowing down when needed.

It means praying.

It means creating room for questions, fears, tears, and hard conversations.

But it also means remembering that God entrusted me with the responsibility of leading our family.

That doesn’t mean controlling everyone’s emotions.

It doesn’t mean forcing anyone into a new chapter.

And it certainly doesn’t mean always getting it right.

It means prayerfully accepting the responsibility God gave me as their mom.

There have been tears.

There have been difficult conversations.

There have been moments when I questioned every decision.

But each one has driven me back to my knees.

I never wanted loneliness to lead me.

I never wanted guilt to lead me.

I never wanted fear to lead me.

I wanted the Lord to lead me.

One of God’s greatest gifts during this season was placing trusted widows in my life—women who had already walked this road.

They listened without judgment.

They asked difficult questions.

They encouraged me when I felt unsure.

And they reminded me of something I desperately needed to hear:

I did not stop being a mom because I was grieving.

My children needed someone willing to go first.

To pray first.

To trust God first.

To surrender first.

And then lovingly invite them to follow.

Leadership is not having every answer.

Sometimes leadership is simply being willing to say:

“I don’t know exactly what tomorrow holds, but I know the One who does.”

God did not call me to be a perfect mom.

He called me to be a faithful one.

And every day, that is the mom I am asking Him to help me become.

The Work No One Saw

One of the things I’ve heard since sharing about Raymond is:

“It all happened so fast.”

And honestly, I understand why it might look that way.

Social media has a way of compressing years into a few posts.

People see a picture.

They see an announcement.

They see a relationship.

And naturally, they assume that must be where the story began.

But it wasn’t.

The work began long before anyone knew Raymond’s name.

It began on the floor beside my bed when all I could do was cry out to God.

It began in the quiet mornings when opening my Bible felt less like a routine and more like survival.

It began in counseling sessions where I had to face hard questions instead of running from them.

It began through conversations with friends who loved me enough to speak truth, even when it was difficult to hear.

It began with widows who understood this road because they had walked it before me.

They gave me permission to ask questions I didn’t know how to ask.

They reminded me I wasn’t wrong for feeling what I felt.

They reminded me that healing does not mean forgetting.

It means learning to trust God with a future you never would have chosen.

Looking back, I can see that God wasn’t simply healing my heart.

He was rebuilding it.

One layer at a time.

There were days I thought I wasn’t making any progress.

Days I wondered if I would ever laugh without guilt.

Days I questioned whether joy was something I was even allowed to feel again.

There were counseling sessions that ended with me crying all the way home.

There were prayers that sounded more like questions than declarations of faith.

There were countless moments when I asked God to make His will so clear that I could not miss it.

Because the last thing I wanted was to run ahead of Him.

If you’ve followed my writing, then maybe you noticed that my stories were not slowly becoming more focused on dating.

They were becoming more focused on Jesus.

On waiting.

On surrender.

On trusting God when life made no sense.

On choosing hope when hope felt impossible.

Long before I met Raymond, God had already begun writing something new in my heart.

Not a story that erased what came before.

Not a story that replaced Quintin.

But a story that reminded me the same God who carried me through unimaginable loss would be faithful enough to lead me into whatever came next.

People have said to me, “Raymond brought you back to life.”

I understand the heart behind those words.

But that is not what happened.

Jesus did.

Jesus met me in my darkest nights.

Jesus carried me when I could not stand on my own.

Jesus restored my faith.

Jesus rebuilt my hope.

Jesus reminded me that my purpose did not end the day I became a widow.

By the time Raymond entered my life, he was not stepping into the life of a woman waiting for someone to rescue her.

He was stepping into a life where God had already been faithfully doing the rescuing.

People can offer companionship.

They can bring laughter.

They can encourage us.

They can walk beside us.

Those are beautiful gifts.

But no person can heal what only Jesus can reach.

Raymond did not begin my healing journey.

He joined a journey God had already been leading for a long time.

When I look back now, I do not see a story that moved quickly.

I see thousands of quiet moments no one witnessed.

Prayers whispered through tears.

Counseling appointments.

Conversations with trusted widows.

Hard conversations with my children.

Late nights wondering what tomorrow might hold.

Countless moments of surrender.

So when people ask how I got here, my answer will never simply be:

“I met the right person.”

My answer will always be:

“I met a faithful God who never stopped meeting me in my grief.”

The View From the Outside

One thing I have learned through sharing my life online is this:

People can only respond to the chapter they are reading.

They don’t always know what happened on the pages before it.

When I shared about Raymond, I knew there would be questions.

I knew some people would celebrate with me.

I knew others might struggle to understand.

From the outside, it could appear that one day I was grieving and the next day I was dating.

But that is not what happened.

Not even close.

Social media shows the announcement.

It rarely shows the preparation.

People saw a photo.

They did not see the prayers before sunrise.

They did not see the counseling appointments.

They did not hear the conversations with trusted widows.

They did not see the nights I cried myself to sleep.

They did not see the times I asked God to search my heart before I ever considered opening it to another person.

The picture was not the beginning of the story.

It was simply the first time I allowed the world to see a chapter God had already been writing.

Healing rarely happens in front of an audience.

Most of it happens in quiet places.

In ordinary moments.

In the sacred space where it is just you and Jesus.

That is where God met me.

That is where He untangled the guilt.

That is where He reminded me that joy was not something I had to earn.

That is where He showed me that loving Quintin and embracing the future God was writing did not have to compete with one another.

Both could be true.

For a long time, I thought moving forward meant leaving something behind.

Now I understand it differently.

Moving forward does not erase love.

It carries forward everything that love taught you.

Quintin will always be part of my story.

He helped shape the woman I am.

He will always be the father of my children.

Nothing about that changes.

Choosing to keep living does not diminish the life we shared.

It honors it.

I truly believe that if Quintin were sitting across from me today, he would not want me to spend the rest of my life simply surviving.

He would want me to keep trusting Jesus.

To keep raising our children well.

To keep using my story to point people to Christ.

To keep living.

That is what I am trying to do.

When people feel that I have moved too quickly, I remind myself that they are looking through a window rather than reading the entire book.

They see the chapter I chose to share.

They do not see every page that came before it.

And that is okay.

Not every chapter has to be lived publicly.

Some of the holiest work God does happens where no one else is watching.

Maybe that is true for you too.

Maybe someone has made assumptions about your journey based on a picture, a conversation, or a single season of your life.

You do not need everyone to understand your journey in order to walk it faithfully.

If you have prayed, sought wise counsel, surrendered your plans to God, and continued to seek His direction, then you can trust Him with the opinions you cannot control.

I am not responsible for making everyone understand my story.

I am responsible for being faithful to the One writing it.

And that is enough.

A Mother’s Greatest Calling

If you have made it this far, I hope you understand that this blog was never really about dating.

It was about motherhood.

It was about learning to trust God after unimaginable loss.

It was about discovering that leading my family into a new chapter looked different than I ever expected.

My children do not need me to be perfect.

They do not need me to pretend I am never scared.

They do not need me to have every answer.

They need a mom who keeps running to Jesus.

A mom who listens.

A mom who apologizes.

A mom who seeks wisdom.

A mom who loves them deeply enough to honor their grief and courageously enough to lead them toward hope.

That is the kind of mom I am asking God to help me become.

When I look at my four children, I don’t see four people who have experienced this journey in the same way.

I see four hearts I have the privilege and responsibility to love.

To pray over.

To encourage.

To protect.

And to continually point back to Jesus.

Their stories are still unfolding.

So is mine.

While I believe God has called me to share my testimony, I have also learned that not every part of our family’s journey belongs online.

Some conversations are sacred to us to them.

Some tears belong only to our family.

Some victories are celebrated quietly.

Some stories simply are not mine to tell.

I hope that one day, if my children choose to share their experiences, they will do it from a place of freedom, not because they felt pressured to answer questions the world was asking.

Until then, I will continue sharing what God has done in my own life.

That is the story He entrusted to me.

Maybe you are reading this while carrying the weight of a decision that affects the people you love most.

Maybe you are wondering if you are getting it right.

Maybe you are waiting for complete certainty before taking another step.

Can I encourage you with what God continues to remind me?

He rarely gives us the entire roadmap.

He simply asks us to trust Him with the next faithful step.

That is what I have tried to do.

One prayer at a time.

One conversation at a time.

One surrendered decision at a time.

Has it been perfect?

Not even close.

Has it been easy?

No.

But it has been covered by the faithfulness of a God who has never once left my side.

When I could not see the next chapter, He already could.

When I questioned my ability to lead, He faithfully led me.

When I wondered if our family would ever laugh again, He slowly restored joy without asking us to forget our grief.

Hope and heartbreak did not have to compete.

By the grace of God, they learned to walk beside one another.

My story is still being written.

So is yours.

And if there is one thing I have learned through every chapter—from losing Quintin, to learning how to lead my family again, to discovering hope I never thought I would experience—it is this:

God has never stopped being faithful.

Not in the heartbreak.

Not in the waiting.

Not in the healing.

Not in the unknown.

He was faithful then.

He is faithful now.

And He will be faithful in whatever chapter comes next.

So if today you are standing in a place where all you can see is loss, keep taking the next faithful step.

Sometimes the bravest thing a parent can do is gently lead their family toward hope.

Not because every question has been answered.

Not because every heart has healed.

Not because every fear has disappeared.

But because Jesus is already in the future, faithfully leading the way.

And sometimes the greatest act of love is not sharing every detail.

Sometimes the greatest act of love is protecting the stories that aren’t ours to tell.

The Author of your story has never left the page.

-Lori

PS- I’d love to hear from you.

Have you ever walked through a season when loving your family meant listening to their hearts while still trusting God enough to lead? Maybe you’re learning how to move forward after loss, change, or a chapter you never expected.

Share what God is teaching you in the comments. Your story may be the encouragement another parent needs today.