Your 16th birthday isn’t just another birthday – it’s a rite of passage. It’s that first real step into adulthood…into freedom.
I remember turning 16 – it was a whole to-do. My mom delivered balloons to the school (which I paraded around all day) and even bought me a car (it was a sporty red Matchbox car…but still…). I immediately went to the DMV after school to get my official driver’s license and drove around town ALONE blaring ‘Barbie Girl’ and ‘Semi-Charmed Life’ like I had somewhere to be {I did not}.
While pregnant, I envisioned doing the same for my child: making the day an EVENT, making it special, and representing it as the rite of passage it truly is.
Then Madelyn died.
And the future I’d been rehearsing in my mind died too.
So, when she should have turned 16, I wanted to do something extra special – for her. Not a party. Not a post. Not an insta-worthy photo op. Not a ‘Look at me and my dead baby’ moment. Because it’s not about me…it’s about honoring a life and what could have been.
I wanted to do something – but anonymously. For months, I’d pictured walking into the DMV on May 19th, 2026 and quietly paying the license fee for a few teens to get their first driver’s license…and offering them a little note:
In honor of my daughter, Madelyn. She didn’t get to grow up. If you’re reading this, you’re getting a moment she never did. When you get the chance, please pay this kindness forward in your own special way… You never know what someone is going through.
I’d planned to explain what I was doing to the person at the desk, provide some cash to cover the costs, and watch how it all played out (anonymously) from the uncomfortable folding chair in the back of the crowd pretending to just be another person ‘waiting my turn’…
That was the plan.
And then her birthday came. I woke up and I couldn’t make myself walk through that door.
The DMV is depressing and overwhelming on a normal Tuesday. Fluorescent lights. Hard chairs. People sighing like the air was personally offending them.
And that Tuesday? The weather and my mood matched the building.
On the other side of that dirty glass door were others going through ‘life as normal’: teenagers doing something that my daughter never got to. And I just didn’t have it in me…not today…
If you’ve ever felt like you needed to bail on a plan that mattered, you’re not weak. You’re grieving.
And here’s the thing I’m still learning to say without apologizing: not walking through that door wasn’t a failure. It was information. It was my heart telling the truth before my head could figure it out. It was grief reminding me that love doesn’t magically make me brave on command—especially on milestone days.
Maybe one day I’ll go back to the DMV and do it—quietly, anonymously, with that little note tucked into the transaction…like a secret.
Maybe I won’t.
But Madelyn doesn’t need me to perform my grief for the world. She doesn’t need me to hit ‘all my marks’ and tear up on cue.
She needs what she’s always needed from me: for her life to matter, for her name to be spoken with a smile, for her love to keep moving through me into the world, to encourage others to love their people OUT LOUD from both sides of the grave…
However and whenever I’m able.
