The Phone Call You Can't Make
The Phone Call You Can't Make
Laura Todd lost her mother to breast cancer in 2015. Six years later, she gave birth to her first child — during COVID, in isolation, without the person she had expected to be there for all of it. She is a therapist who specializes in exactly this experience. She is also living it.
In this episode of Who We Become — Life Beyond Change, Amanda Lentz sits down with Laura Todd — licensed professional clinical counselor, perinatal mental health certified therapist, infant mental health specialist, and founder of Bond Therapy — for a conversation about the grief that arrives not at a funeral but in a delivery room.
There is an assumption built into almost every conversation about new motherhood. It assumes a village. It assumes a grandmother on her way. It assumes the phone call you can always make at 2 a.m. when you don't know what you're doing and you just need your mom. Laura Todd knows what it means when that phone call isn't possible. She has lived it, navigated it, and built a practice specifically for the women living it right now.
Meet Her Mom
Laura begins, at Amanda's invitation, not with the loss — but with the person. Her mother was a statistician at Stanford University for thirty-six years. She raised four children, drove her son up to San Francisco every week for a specialty high school band, volunteered through Girl Scouts and church, and was the person other mothers in the neighborhood came to for advice on their own parenting. She was passionate, loving, affectionate, and opinionated — judgmental, Laura says with warmth, but always with love and care at the core of it.
She wanted to be a grandmother badly. She made no secret of it. Laura, the youngest of four, would joke about it at eighteen — she could technically provide grandchildren right now, she'd tell her mother, who would immediately clarify that she had not meant her.
She died in March 2015, on a sunny California Saturday morning, in her own bedroom, with her husband beside her. She had been given four weeks. She had four days.
"It was March. It was sunny, because it's California. I remember that very distinctly. And just trying to figure out where we were going to go from here, because she was such an epicenter of the family."
— Laura ToddBecoming a Mother Without Her
Laura had known, somewhere, that motherhood was going to be hard without her mom. She had already navigated her wedding without her. She knew what was coming. What she hadn't fully anticipated was the particular texture of COVID-era isolation layered on top of that grief — no family able to visit, no sister or sister-in-law to come over even briefly, no access to the knowledge and comfort and reassurance she had watched her mother provide to every new parent in their orbit.
She remembers watching her nephew being born years earlier. Her mother had made her sister breakfast. Answered her questions. Normalized the things that felt alarming. Held the weight of early new motherhood with her. Laura had none of that. She had a baby who wouldn't latch. Sleep deprivation. Postpartum anxiety. And underneath all of it, something sharper:
"I remember being really angry that this was my reality, that this was unfair. I want to talk to my mom. That's all I want right now, and I don't have her. And that is so unfair."
— Laura ToddShe was also a therapist who had spent six or seven years working in infant and early childhood mental health. She knew what an infant needed for healthy development. She could see the gap between what she understood professionally and what she was able to provide in those early weeks. That tension — between what she knew and what she had capacity for — became its own kind of pressure.
Eventually, it became the catalyst for something more intentional: figuring out how to move through the grief and the anger so she could show up for her son while still honoring the relationship he would never get to have with the grandmother who would have adored him.
The Anger Nobody Talks About
Laura is specific about something most conversations around postpartum grief skip entirely: anger. The righteous, legitimate, entirely reasonable anger of a new mother who expected something she didn't get. Who is told she should be grateful. Who is expected to perform joy in a season that is also full of grief.
In trauma work, she calls it righteous anger — the anger you have a valid reason to feel, which you are simultaneously discouraged from expressing because it makes other people uncomfortable, or because it reads as unappreciative, or because women are not culturally encouraged to be aggressive even in ways that are completely warranted.
"Anger is just really hard to talk about in motherhood because either we're supposed to be grateful that we even have a child — or we're told how we should feel. And it minimizes our justified anger."
— Laura ToddThe result is that the anger goes underground. It doesn't disappear. It just becomes something women carry privately, without language for it, without permission to name it, and without the relief that naming it might bring. Laura's work — and this conversation — is partly about giving that anger back its legitimacy.
Building a Village When You Have to Start From Zero
The turn toward community began with a lactation consultant who came to Laura's house a few days after her son's birth, got him latching within twenty minutes, and became a dear friend. It continued with a postpartum doula who came four hours a day during the week — holding the baby so Laura could sleep, teaching her to baby wear, relieving the specific, physical exhaustion of doing everything alone while her husband was at work.
It expanded into a group of friends who all had babies within weeks of each other, spread across time zones, available at 3 a.m. because someone in Denmark or on the East Coast was always awake. It included an online postpartum support group through her OB that mixed first-time and experienced mothers, where the experienced ones could say: yes, that's normal, it gets easier around three months, here's what worked for us.
That three-month mark is something Laura now shares with the parents she works with: it's when the rhythm solidifies, when the confidence starts to build, when the day stops feeling like pure survival. Getting there is the hard part. Once you're there, things shift.
"You can't do motherhood in isolation. This idea of two parents to one child just doesn't scale. You have to be in community with other people, other moms, even if it's paid support."
— Laura ToddShe is particularly clear about something that doesn't get said enough: it is okay if your village is paid. The lactation consultant. The postpartum doula. The childcare teachers who know your children by name, know their personalities, and act as genuine partners in raising them. Community does not have to be blood family. It does not have to be free. In a world where people move more and extended family is often far away, paid community is still community.
How to Start Building Community Now
Grief That Keeps Arriving
Laura's oldest is four now. Her youngest is a year and a half. And the grief keeps coming — not as a crisis, but as a pang. When her son's personality comes out and she thinks of how much her mother would have loved to see it. When someone mentions their kids spending the weekend at Grandma's. When her oldest, who loves dance, is about to have his first recital — performing the same way she did at his age — and she knows exactly how much her mother would have wanted to be in that audience.
She has built a mural of photographs of herself and her mother throughout her childhood, hung in her bedroom. She talks about her mother to her children. She has taken them to where her mother is buried. She calls her "Gramsy" and tells them how much Gramsy loves them and is watching them grow. She does this, she says honestly, more for herself than for them right now. But she keeps doing it.
"The biggest thing I do is I keep talking about her. I keep acknowledging her existence in our lives even if she's not physically present with us."
— Laura ToddHer tool for the moments when the grief swells unexpectedly is simple and grounded in neuroscience: she breathes. Breathing regulates the nervous system faster than anything else. She acknowledges what she's feeling to her husband, who knew her mother before she passed and understands the magnitude of the loss. She lets herself feel it, and then she comes back.
Why This Conversation Matters
There is no preparation for becoming a mother without your mother. There is no warning that the grief you thought you had learned to carry will arrive again, differently, in the middle of a moment that is supposed to be purely joyful. There is no language for the particular silence of a phone call you cannot make.
Laura Todd does this work from inside the experience, not just beside it. She is a clinician who can name what is happening and a mother who is living it simultaneously. Both things are true at once, and the combination is what makes this conversation so rare.
If you are a motherless mother, or navigating the postpartum season without the support you expected, this conversation was made for you. The anger is legitimate. The grief is real. You are not failing. And you are not alone in any of it.
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