Sometimes You Just Need to Have a Conversation with a Three-Year-Old

Some conversations stay with you forever.

Not because they’re profound.

Not because someone said exactly the right thing.

But because they happened at exactly the moment you needed them.

This is one of those conversations.

It happened two days after my mom died.

Grief has a way of making the world feel strangely quiet. I remember sitting on the couch with my three-year-old granddaughter, Addy, and trying to make it through the afternoon.

She looked at me and said, “Grandma, why is your face so red?”

“I’m just a little sad,” I said.]

“Why are you sad?”

“Because I miss my mommy.”

She giggled.

“You don’t have a mommy. You’re a grandma.”

I smiled. “Everyone has a mommy.”

She thought about that for a minute.

“Oh.”

A few minutes passed. I stared out the window, trying to hold myself together, when she spoke again.

“Grandma… who was your mommy?”

I asked if she’d like to see a picture.

Addy has a lot of grandmas. We have five generations in our family, so trying to explain who belonged to whom wasn’t something I had the energy for that day. Instead, I pulled out a picture of my mom.

She looked at it for a second and burst into laughter.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked.

“Because if that grandma is your mommy, that’s really funny!”

And honestly, it was.

For the first time in days, I laughed too.

A little while later, after we’d both gone back to playing quietly, she looked up at me again.

“Grandma… you don’t have to be sad because my mommy is your mommy… and I’m your Addy.”

I don’t think she had any idea what she had just given me.

She wasn’t trying to make me feel better.

She wasn’t trying to fix my grief.

She simply loved me the best way a three-year-old knows how.

I’ve thought about that conversation many times since then.

As adults, we often feel like we need the right words when someone is hurting. We worry about saying the wrong thing, so sometimes we say nothing at all.

Kids don’t do that.

They sit beside you.

They ask questions.

They notice when your face is red.

They say what they’re thinking.

And somehow, in all that beautiful simplicity, they remind us that we aren’t carrying our hurts alone.

That afternoon didn’t change the fact that my mom was gone.

It didn’t make grief hurt any less.

But it reminded me that even in the middle of heartbreak, love is still finding its way to us.

Sometimes through a friend.

Sometimes through a neighbor.

Sometimes through someone who simply sits beside us without trying to fix anything.

And sometimes through a three-year-old little girl who thought the funniest thing she’d ever heard was that her grandma had a mommy too.

It’s one of my favorite memories of Addy.

Not because it took my grief away.

But because it reminded me that even on the hardest days, there is still room for laughter.

And maybe that’s one of the gifts of being surrounded by people who love us.

They don’t always make the hard things disappear.

But somehow, they make them a little easier to carry.

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