137: How to Survive Mother's Day After Losing Your Baby

Are you already dreading Mother's Day? You are not alone — and you are not doing grief wrong.

If your chest gets tight just thinking about Mother's Day... if you're already noticing the ads, the brunch promos, the "best mom ever" posts, and your body is bracing weeks before the day even arrives — this episode is for you. That heaviness has a name. It's anticipatory grief. And it's so much more common than anyone tells you.

In this episode, I'm not going to try to fix Mother's Day or hand you a list of ways to "get through it." I'm just going to sit with you in the truth of it — share my own first Mother's Day after losing my twins, and give you permission to feel exactly what you're feeling.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why the weeks leading up to Mother's Day often feel heavier than the day itself- and what anticipatory grief actually is
• The story of my first Mother's Day after losing my twin daughters, and the conflicted feelings I never expected to have
• Why you can feel like a mother and feel completely inadequate at the same time- and why both are valid
• The guilt that creeps in when you don't want to celebrate a day that's "supposed to be beautiful"
• What to do when your family wants brunch, your friends send cheerful texts, and your partner has no idea what you need
• Why feeling alone in a room full of people who love you is one of the loneliest parts of this day
• Permission to say the things you're already thinking - "I hate this day. I wish I could skip it. I don't feel like a mom."
• How to start deciding what this day looks like for you- not for everyone else
• Why planning ahead for hard days is a game changer (and not the same as "powering through")

Read the full blog post here: https://navigatingbabyloss.com/post/mothers-day-after-stillbirth-dread-137

If you want gentle, bite-sized support for moments exactly like this, the Stillbirth Roadmap Experience is open to you. Ten days of lessons delivered straight to your inbox, plus a personal call with me at the end. You can find it at navigatingbabyloss.com/roadmap.

https://navigatingbabyloss.com/workshop

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Download my FREE "Guilt and Grief Release Journal" at navigatingbabyloss.com/journal

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Transcript

Well, here we are. Mother's Day is coming. And I know that you can already feel it. You can feel that tightness in your chest. I am noticing comments about dread, about how much you're dreading Mother's Day. And so I wanted to bring it to light right here, right now. This episode is not going to be about how to get through the day or how to fix it. It's merely going to be just an honest approach and just confirm that what you're feeling is really normal.

My first Mother's Day after losing my twins was about six months afterwards. And I remember that anticipation and that internal struggle of feeling like, okay, I already have kids. I've been a mother for five years. So here's Mother's Day. I have to celebrate Mother's Day for my own mother and grandmother. My grandmother was alive at the time, and my mother-in-law — there's all these other mothers that came into play. But I remember feeling very much like, that's great. Let's celebrate them, but don't celebrate me. Which was unfair, because I still was a mother. I just felt so inadequate.

And also, what I do know about these types of holidays, if you will, is that anticipatory grief is a real thing. I just read an article about it and how real it is. I noticed it myself for years before I ever knew it was a thing. And I know, for years after, even the smell of the air around the time when I was pregnant for them, or about the time I experienced my loss, would settle in my body as grief. I could feel it just smelling the air, because it was so familiar to that time. And so I know for sure that anticipatory grief is a thing, and very much for me — and for a lot of moms that I work with — it is worse the days leading up to the holiday or the anniversary or the birthday or event, whatever it is, than the actual day itself.

So if you are feeling this Mother's Day dread coming up, if you're starting to feel it in your bones, in your body, just know that very likely the actual Mother's Day itself might not be as bad as you are anticipating. And that's a huge relief. Sometimes it's just a relief to know that.

So when it comes especially to Mother's Day — Mother's Day is an especially hard time, and I know the dread starts. It's not just the day of. Even though it really all leads up to the day of, it is already happening. It's weeks of seeing the moms and the ads and the flowers and the brunch promos and the best mom ever contests. And your body just starts bracing before you even know what is happening. And it's because all of this is coming into play about something that should have been going on for you, something that you should have been celebrating — whether you were still going to be pregnant then, or whether you had had your baby, or maybe it's 10 or 20 years ago. There's always this underlying feeling around Mother's Day, like, hmm, something's missing.

So I want you to know that that anticipation, again, is very real. The abrasiveness that you're feeling on these weeks leading up to Mother's Day is completely normal, and it's very real.

And then, as always, the guilt comes beating in. You feel guilty for dreading the day that is supposed to be beautiful. I remember feeling it so much. I felt so guilty, because — why would I? I remember telling my husband, I just don't want to celebrate Mother's Day at all. I just don't even — why do I even have to do it? I don't feel like celebrating anything about Mother's Day. And then instantly I felt guilty. Well, I had my mother and my grandmother, and my kids wanted to celebrate me, and I should want to celebrate them. There should be all of this going around. But there was so much guilt about not wanting this day to come that was supposed to be celebrating me, and also the guilt of celebrating so many others.

Then there's the feeling, too, that if you don't celebrate it at all, does that mean that you were never a mother? That it never happened? So there's also that side of it that makes you feel guilty. Like, why would I want to celebrate something when I'm not actually a mother? I don't have a baby. So if that's coming in for you too, stay tuned. I have something special for you next week on that. But that is also a very real thought. So don't beat yourself up about it. I just want to normalize that for you.

Not only do you have your own internal struggles and thoughts about whether or not to celebrate Mother's Day, or what does Mother's Day mean to you — as we are ramping it up and it is coming at you full force everywhere you look, you also are getting the pressure from other people. You have your family who wants to do brunch. You have your friend group who sends the cheerful Happy Mother's Day wishes all around, and they included you, but they weren't sure that they should have, and you don't know if you wish they would've either. Your partner doesn't know what to do. They're not sure if they should be wishing you happy Mother's Day, or trying to make the whole day just disappear, or celebrating, or just ignoring it. They're not sure where to be in this whole thing either.

And so it can be really isolating to be surrounded by these people who make you feel completely alone in this.

So I'm giving you permission to say the things I already know that you're saying. Here are the things I already know that you're saying, and I want to give you permission to say them. I hate this day. I wish I could skip it. I don't feel like a mom. I feel like everyone forgot. You are allowed to think these things. It is completely normal.

And what you actually need is permission to decide what this day looks like for you. If no one else were standing there with brunch invitations or flowers, or possibly ignoring it altogether, what kind of Mother's Day would you like to celebrate? Would it be something with your baby? Would it be something just for you? You are allowed to set these boundaries. You can say no. You can honor your baby however it feels right to you, and you don't have to have an explanation. You do get to choose that.

Dreading this is normal. It means nothing about you. It means nothing about how your grief is, how you're handling your grief. You don't have to say yes to anything that you don't want to, and you are allowed to think all of the things that you're thinking and feel how you want to feel. You can feel sad and angry and all of it. But I am encouraging you to do some planning ahead. This is something I teach in my Stillbirth Roadmap program. It is a game changer. Just thinking ahead to who's going to be there, what might they say, how are you going to handle the things that they say. How do you want to — if you go, what are your rules around going? If you don't go, how are you going to decline it? I cover all of that in my Stillbirth Roadmap. But just really deciding to make this plan for yourself for this day can take a huge, huge weight off of you.

So I just wanted you to know that before this event arrives, that I see you. And next week I have something to say that I want you to hear. So don't miss that.

And I am inviting you into my Stillbirth Roadmap Experience, because it is a 10-day experience where I send you bite-sized lessons on how to cope with all of these things. How to reconnect with your partner, how to deal with comments from other people, how to plan hard days when you know that they're going to be full of grief. And then at the end of that 10-day period, you get an invitation to talk with me, and we talk about how that integrates into your everyday life. So you can check that out at navigatingbabyloss.com/roadmap.

But until next week, I am sending you so much love. And I want you to think about this Mother's Day and what you want it to mean for you, because what that means is what's important — not what it means for everyone else. I'll see you then.