Forget what you’ve heard about the legendary Grizzly Bear of Alaska. It ain’t the Nile Crocodile or even the Siberian Tiger. Both lame in comparison. White Rhino, African Leopard, Bush Elephant, Gorilla. Nope.
Let’s talk about what everyone knows and few seem to be acknowledging.
Women are the toughest creatures on this planet. Period.
Not in spite of their softness. Because of it. The love they carry, the way they absorb pain without flinching, the way they hold everything together with both hands while nobody’s watching. That’s not weakness wearing mascara and blush. That ‘s the most refined, battle-tested form of strength the human species has ever produced.
And the wildest part? Most of them have no idea.
They don’t call themselves warriors. They call themselves Moms.
This is for them. This is for you. Keep reading.
To Every Woman in the Middle of Something Hard
If you’re fighting for a child the world doesn’t fully understand yet. If you’re absorbing your kids’ pain like a sponge because you’d rather carry it yourself than watch them drown in it. If you’re bone tired in a way that a good night’s sleep stopped fixing a long time ago…listen to me:
You are not falling apart. You are being remade.
The version of you that existed before this chapter could not have handled what you are handling right now. That’s not an accident. That’s the specific, almost violent grace of becoming who you needed to be. I’ve watched it happen. Up close.
My wife Jessica has two kids she would walk through fires of hell for without a second thought. Our daughter Peyton and our son Brady.
Brady lives with bipolar disorder and his emotional world is vast, turbulent and beautiful in ways that ask everything of the people who love him. What I have watched Jessica do in the years of raising him is something I don’t have a single clean word for. She rides the roller coaster with Brady. Every rise, every drop, every unexpected twist and turn. When Brady is sad, Jessica is sad. Not run of the mill empathy, not sympathizing from a safe distance. She is IN it with him, holding his hand through the whole thing, because that is what her love looks like in action. When he is happy, her whole face changes. She gives up sleep, plans, personal comfort, the quiet life she might have had, without complaint, without scorekeeping, without ever making him feel like a burden for a single second.
With Peyton, the love is no less fierce. It just speaks a different language. Peyton is almost grown now, finding her way in the world, building the life that is hers to build. And when she hits a wall, when she needs a shoulder, when she needs someone to think through a hard decision with her or just to hear her without judgment, she calls Jessica. Not sometimes. First. Always. That’s not a small thing. That’s the evidence of a relationship built on years of showing up in exactly the right way, not smothering, not absent, but present in the way that makes a daughter want to keep coming back. Peyton doesn’t just love her mother. She studies her. She watches the way Jessica loves her kids and thinks, quietly… this is how I want to do it someday. A mother who becomes the blueprint. There is no higher compliment a woman can receive.
Two kids. Two completely different kinds of hard. Two completely different kinds of love required. And Jessica shows up for both of them, fully, every single time.
That is not martyrdom. That is a mother’s quiet strength at full power.
Shannon Crawford knows that power too. And this April, her story deserves to be heard.
Shannon’s Story: Love That Refuses to Flinch
Shannon didn’t wake up one morning and decide to become extraordinary. Extraordinary found her the way it finds most mothers, wrapped in a cancer diagnosis, a pediatrician’s office, and a silence that changes everything. When Shannon learned her child was profoundly autistic, the world she had imagined quietly reshuffled itself. What followed wasn’t a single heroic moment. It was thousands of small ones: the appointments, the advocacy, the late nights down research rabbit holes, the fighting for accommodations in hotels full of people who didn’t yet see what she saw. It was learning a new language, not just about autism, but about her own child, and in the process, about herself.
She became, as so many mothers do, a new person almost overnight.
As we honor Autism Awareness Month this April, Shannon’s story isn’t only about autism. It’s about what love does when it’s given no alternative but to be fierce.
The Death of the Woman She Was — And the Birth of Someone More
The comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote that the hero’s journey always begins with a death of the former self, a threshold crossing that is as painful as it is necessary. What Campbell didn’t say loudly enough is that mothers walk this threshold every single time they produce life. There’s science to hold this truth. Researchers call it “matrescence“, the profound neurological and identity transformation a woman undergoes when she becomes a mother. Brain scans show that the maternal brain literally rewires itself. Gray matter reshapes. Emotional processing centers expand. Attention sharpens with predatory focus. The woman she was before does not simply change. She dissolves, and something new, something more capable of love than she ever imagined, is born in her place.
The woman who walked into that labor and delivery wing isn’t the woman who walked out. The woman who walked out was already becoming someone the world would not easily push around.
Jessica went through that same fire. She’ll tell you motherhood changed her, and she’s right, but what she might not say is how completely. There’s a version of her that existed before Peyton and Brady that she barely remembers now. The woman raising those two kids, fighting alongside them through the hard seasons, is someone forged in love that refuses to quit. I’m deeply in love with every version of Jessica I’ve gotten to know over our 26 years together. I can’t wait to fall in love with the next version of her too.
She Is Not Alone in History or in Myth
Women have always been the quiet architects of survival. History just forgot to write it down loudly enough. Woman are bad asses. Always have been. Always will be.
Demeter, in Greek mythology, dismantled the entire natural world when her daughter Persephone was taken from her. Crops died. Winter stretched across the earth without end. The gods themselves were forced to negotiate, because a mother’s grief, unmet, is a force that will unravel the cosmos before it will simply stop. This was not weakness in disguise. This was power in its most elemental form.
Yocheved, in the Hebrew scriptures, placed her infant son Moses into a basket on the Nile rather than surrender him to death. Think about the courage that required. Not the thunderclap kind, but the slow, heartbroken, strategic kind. She outsmarted a Pharaoh with a reed basket and a mother’s refusal to accept an impossible ending.
Harriet Tubman made thirteen missions into the South to free enslaved people, carried a pistol, and told those who faltered they could either keep moving or meet God. She was herself a daughter who had watched her mother fight for her children’s lives with every resource available. She carried that fierceness forward like a torch.
Malala Yousafzai’s mother, Toor Pekai, could not read or write, but she raised a daughter who stood before the United Nations at sixteen and changed the conversation about girls’ education forever. Behind every world-changing child is almost always a woman who believed in them when believing took courage.
And then there is the quiet mythology of everyday women. The Shannon Crawfords. The Jessica Ellisons. Too many millions to recognize individually. The women who never make the history books but whose love is no less epic in its reach.
Strength That Doesn’t Know Its Own Name
Here is what nobody tells you about courage: it rarely feels like courage from the inside.
It feels like total exhaustion. It feels like one more phone call, one more medical form to fill out, one more explanation about what you’re suffering through to someone who doesn’t quite get it. It feels like sitting in a parking lot after a rough day choking down a stale granola bar because there was no time for lunch, again. It feels like choosing, every single day, to get back up, not because it’s heroic, but because there is a child who needs you to.
I’ve sat across from Jessica on the hard nights and watched her do exactly that. Not dramatically. Not seeking recognition. Just quietly deciding, again, to show up. To keep going. To be the steady hand on the roller coaster even when she was terrified too.
That is the truest kind of strength. Not the kind that knows it’s brave. The kind that has no other choice.
Women have been doing this since the beginning of recorded time, and long before anyone was recording. They have navigated grief, sickness, war, displacement, dismissal, and the quiet daily weight of being underestimated, and they have done it while making dinner and remembering dentist appointments and still somehow asking… Honey, how was your day?
The fiercest love on earth does not roar. It shows up.
A Call to Action — Because These Stories Deserve to Travel
April is Autism Awareness Month, but what Shannon’s story, and Jessica’s story, and maybe your story, are really about goes far beyond a calendar. It’s about what love looks like when it has no choice but to become something that moves mountains.
Here’s how you carry this forward:
- Listen to the full episode with Shannon Crawford. Her words deserve to be heard in her own voice.
- Share this post with every mother you know who is in the middle of something hard. Let her know what she already is.
- Follow the podcast — The Story of Us: From Cosmic Dawn to the Depths of Being — for more conversations with women whose quiet strength is rewriting the world from the inside out. Women like Molly Jones and Kathy Quinlan and Melanie Love.
- Tag a woman in your life who has been braver than she knew, who rose to meet something she never asked for, and did it with grace.
- And if this resonated with you, if you saw yourself, or your mother, or your wife, or your best friend in these words, leave a comment and tell us her story.
The world needs more of this. More of her.
Because a mother’s love is not the softest thing in the world. It is the strongest. And it’s time we stopped confusing the two.
Listen. Share. Celebrate the fierce.
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