My mum died on a Sunday morning. Two days later I stood in front of seventy people and ran a sold-out workshop.
Not because I was okay. Not because I wanted to. Because when you run a service-based business and you are the business, nobody is coming to tap you out when your life falls apart.
It’s almost two years now. I can write that sentence without my chest collapsing, which feels like its own small betrayal. Mum had early-onset Alzheimer’s. She was diagnosed in her fifties and died at sixty-nine, after years of our family grieving her in instalments while she was still alive. By the time the phone rang just after midnight that Sunday, I genuinely thought I’d done the hard part. I thought the long goodbye was a kind of preparation.
It isn’t. Nothing is.
What I remember most clearly about the days between her death and that workshop isn’t grief, exactly. It’s logistics. Funeral photos chosen between emails. A eulogy rehearsed in the car. The strange administrative calm that settles over you when there’s nowhere else for the grief to go. I was answering client DMs the morning of the funeral. Not because anyone made me. Because I’d built a business where stopping felt more frightening than continuing.
This is the part nobody warns you about when you go out on your own.
There’s no bereavement leave for sole traders. No one covering your shift. No manager saying take the week, we’ve got this. If you stop, the income stops. Your clients don’t suddenly stop having launches. Your inbox doesn’t pause out of respect. The mortgage doesn’t care that your mother just died.
Most of the women in that workshop knew. They’d followed me online for years and watched our family live through Alzheimer’s in real time. I opened by telling them straight: my mum died on Sunday, I probably won’t be my usual eccentric self, but you’re here to learn and I’m not going to let you down.
I’m not going to let you down.
I’ve thought about that sentence a lot in the two years since. It tells you everything about the contract women in service businesses have quietly signed. We don’t let people down. Not when we’re sick, not when we’re heartbroken, not when our kids are imploding behind the Zoom background. We keep replying. We keep performing. We keep being “professional” – a word that, the more I sit with it, mostly seems to mean do not inconvenience anyone with the fact that you are a person.
Grief inside a service business is strange because there’s nowhere to put it. Your calendar still exists. Your clients still need you to show up as the version of yourself they paid for. So you compartmentalise, which is a clinical word for the deeply unclinical experience of crying in the shower and then doing your eyeliner for a 10am.
I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m writing it because we have built an entire cultural mythology around female entrepreneurship… the freedom, the flexibility, the being your own boss, and almost none of it accounts for what happens when real life arrives. When someone dies. When your body gives out. When the person you’re caring for needs more than your evenings.
We talk about resilience like it’s a virtue. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s just the only option a woman has been left with, dressed up in language that makes the rest of us feel inspired by her instead of furious on her behalf.
I ran the workshop. It went well. People told me afterwards I was brave, and I smiled and thanked them, and drove home, and didn’t get out of bed properly for about a week. The version of that story we usually tell stops at she showed up anyway. I want us to start telling the rest of it.
The cost is real. And pretending it isn’t is how we keep handing the next woman the same impossible script.
Image: Maree Sortino (left) alongside her mother (right).