Grief has a strange way of archiving itself in the rooms of our lives, waiting for a pivotal moment to resurface.

My firstborn starting school reignited a latent grief I hadn't expected, not because he was growing up, but because of the ghosts waiting for me inside the classroom.

In the weeks leading up to my son starting school, I polled my friends. Some were counting down the minutes until they got their freedom back, while others were already mourning the end of the "little years". When I walked into the classroom with my son, I wasn't just hit with the standard mix of excitement and nerves, I was blindsided by a wave of intense and suffocating grief.

Yes, I was grieving the boy who was growing up, but it was more than that.

Watch: How to function through grief. Post continues below.

It wasn't my first time in that classroom or meeting those teachers. For seven years, that same room was my classroom. I was the teacher. It was also the place where I had looked death straight in the eye and suffered unimaginable loss, over and over again, all while pretending everything was okay.

Back then, my life was split in two. Inside those four walls, I was the teacher everyone expected me to be, but outside of them, I was a woman consumed by a medical battle that had started years earlier with a single, nagging intuition.

I have always been, as my friends describe it, over-vigilant about my health. Even in my 20s, I was instilled with a constant fear about looking after myself, so I was routinely scanned by my GP. On one visit I was told I had irregular cells on my cervix, but that it was nothing sinister.

Over several years, I went through four rounds of laser treatment, with the scans coming back irregular. My gut told me something was wrong and, guided by my intuition (that I now know saved my life) I decided to swap doctors.

Everything moved at lightning speed after that. One morning I saw my new doctor, a specialist oncologist, and by the end of the week he was calling me back to his office. I remember that call distinctly, it had come through just as I had finished a reading lesson with my class. On the phone he suggested I bring my partner (now my husband) to see him first thing in the morning.

I knew it wasn't good, but in that moment I adopted a "one foot in front of the other" routine. I took a deep breath and I returned to the classroom to teach another lesson. I wiped noses, sorted out arguments in the playground, and acted like nothing was happening because, for all I knew, it could be nothing. I hoped it was nothing.

The next morning, I dressed for the appointment in a structured pale pink knit dress and beige wedges as a costume of normalcy. In the meeting, my partner was in tears, but I just sat and listened. It wasn't just abnormal cells, it was cancer. The doctor suggested a pioneering surgery to remove my cervix while trying to save my fertility. My mind immediately went to the children I might never have, the fear surpassing that of the disease itself.

When the surgery was over and the results were in I went back to his office. He told me the cancer had been removed and my lymph nodes were clear. The relief was so violent it felt like a physical blow. I stood up and hugged him. He was a man of giant stature and I remember feeling like a child as I was cradled by him, finally letting go.

His nurse looked at me and said that I was one of the lucky ones and I've never taken that for granted.

With one battle over, my second marathon of heartache was just beginning. Over the next few years, my life became a revolving door of medical intervention. I saw six different doctors and underwent seven rounds of IVF. No one can truly explain the crippling, all-consuming pain of IVF. I spent entire nights on chat forums, scrolling for hours in the dark, looking for one good sign or one success story that looked like mine.

During the school terms, the two-week wait was a torture of its own. I would excuse myself from my students every hour to check for blood, my heart racing every time I opened the bathroom stall door. Then, the calls would come. I'd receive the news from the nurses that another round had failed. Every failed cycle felt like a death, a silent funeral I had to attend alone before walking back out to tie shoelaces and sing-songs.

In those days there was no miscarriage leave. My life was a relentless cycle of 5:30am scans and blood tests in cold clinics before racing to school to beat the first bell.

I suffered six miscarriages in total and six failed rounds of IVF, living in a state of constant physical and emotional whiplash. I remember the terror of finding blood on my work clothes mid-lesson and having to mask my panic with a smile for the sake of the children.

When the weight of it all became too much to carry, I would seek refuge in a plastic cubby house in the playground, crying and shaking where no one could see me. I would then dry my eyes, take a breath, and walk back inside to lead a phonics lesson or settle a squabble over a shared glue stick. I was performing the role of a teacher while my own world was falling apart.

When my son finally arrived, the world outside was quiet, locked down by a global pandemic. But inside our bubble, the joy was deafening. After seven years of clinical white walls and the crushing silence of failed rounds, his first cry was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.

To hold him in my arms during COVID felt like a double miracle, a tiny, breathing defiance against all the grief that had come before. I spent those early months convinced that his presence had finally scrubbed away the trauma of the 'before times'. I thought I had healed.

Standing in that classroom again, the walls reminded me of what I'd been through. I wasn't just a mother now watching her son begin his school journey, I was a woman who had taught in that same room, while clutching a secret diagnosis and wondering if she would ever survive.

I was still that young woman in a pale pink knit dress, pretending to be whole while falling apart.

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As I looked at my son, the dream baby who I had spent a decade fighting for. My tears finally turned into peace with a beautiful realisation. He was the answer to every midnight forum I'd scrolled through and every whispered prayer in that staff bathroom. He was the success story I'd searched for.

I know he won't understand the layers that room holds, but as I watched him find his seat, I hoped that he carried some of the armour that I had forged there. I hoped that through the years of needles and "one foot in front of the other", resilience, I had passed something on to him. I wanted him to know the lesson I learned the hard way in that very classroom, that almost all things are hard before they are good.

He won't know for a long time that he was born from a battle hard-fought, but I know he will carry that same quiet determination in his bones. He will learn when things feel impossible, you just keep showing up.

When I drop him off at school each day I take comfort in knowing that I have handed him the baton of my resilience. At the end of each day I am rewarded, getting to take home the miracle that I fought for.

Feature Image: Getty.