There’s a moment — that split second when a doctor says the word cancer — when your world quietly cracks open. You think you’ll scream, or crumble, or run. But instead, you sit there. You nod. You ask a question that doesn’t make sense. You try to hold your daughter’s hand steady while yours trembles.

And in that moment, you start to question everything.

I used to think I had a strong mom gut. I trusted it — when she was a baby and I knew something wasn’t right, when she was in grade school and I sensed a fever before the thermometer confirmed it, when I felt in my bones that something deeper was wrong this time. I pushed for appointments, tests, opinions. Still, after the diagnosis, that “gut” I had always trusted suddenly felt like a stranger.

How did I miss it?

Should I have pushed harder?

Did I ignore a sign?

Did I do something wrong before all this — in her diet, in her life, in the way I raised her?

Motherhood has a way of making you question yourself on the best of days. Cancer amplifies it to a deafening roar. Every decision — what to feed her, when to rest, how to explain things — becomes a test you’re terrified to fail. You second-guess every instinct, even though instinct is all you really have left.

But somewhere in the middle of the chaos — the hospital nights, the quiet drives home, the moments when you learn to read the monitors as if they’re another language — something shifts.

You find your footing again.

Not because things get easier, but because you realize that you were never wrong to trust your gut. It didn’t disappear; it was just buried under fear and grief and exhaustion. When you strip those away — even for a second — it’s still there, whispering the same truth it always has: You know your child. You are her safe place. You are enough.

Cancer changes everything — your priorities, your patience, your faith in things you thought were unshakeable. But it also shows you the quiet strength that lives inside you, waiting to rise when you need it most.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop questioning myself entirely. Maybe that’s part of being a mom — loving so fiercely that you can’t help but wonder if you’re doing it right. But I do know this: my gut, that mother’s intuition I thought I lost, never left me. It carried me through the darkest nights. It reminded me when to fight, when to rest, when to listen, and when to just hold her hand.

And that’s what I hold on to now — not certainty, but trust. Trust that even in the most uncertain places, a mother’s heart still knows the way.