Grief, Loss and Being Pregnant without a Mother

I'm going to keep my podcast show notes short today because I just recorded the podcast without planning it. I just hit record and spoke from the heart. It's a very personal podcast that was hard for me to record and I don't quite fancy having to regurgitate it all for the sake of writing a proper blog post to go with it.



During the podcast I talk about the more difficult emotions that we have to experience during pregnancy, specifically grief and loss. This is because last night I found out that someone who was very dear to me died, someone who was like a dad to me when I was a little girl. And this brought back a lot of my own painful emotions about losing my mother when I was 30 years old.
Grief, loss and other difficult emotions
When we're pregnant, we're likely to expereince the who range of human emotions that simply come from being a human being living life. I know I've said in other podcasts that we need to try to marinade out baby in positive emotions because the negative ones can harm your baby. But I'd like to make clear that I'm not referring to the more difficult human experience that might include feelings of grief and loss. Your baby is an emotionally intelligent being already and will already be experiencing their own set of emotions. And, it's important that we prepare our baby for its life as a human being, and this means experiencing the whole range of human emotions. The emotions that are damaging are consistent levels of stress. Stress is a build up of all that you haven't dealt with or processed and stress has a direct impact on the body. Stress is also something we can do something about. We can take action to reduce our feelings of stress. From something as simple as taking a walk in nature or meditation, to actively trying to reduce your stress through using something like my 5 Step Head Trash Clearance Method. When it comes to emotions like grief, loss and sadness I believe that these need to be owned and embraced. For us to feel them, live with them and process them....and eventually move through them. Not to deny them and bottle them up.
Being Pregnant without a Mother
Being pregnant without a mother is not an easy journey by any means, and it continues in your life as a mother. The annual reminder that is Mother's Day is a stark reminder of everything that you have and everything that you don't have in colliding brutally in one single day. It's a hard day, for me anyhow. But actually everyday is a challenge. There are always so many reminders of mothers; friends talking about their mothers, even wingeing about their mothers, stories of their mothers droppping by to help them look after their kids; just seeing kids and their mums is hard. Mums are everywhere and I am reminded everyday that mine is no longer with me, and that she was taken too early.

Being pregnant without a mother can feel daunting, like you have no-one to show you the ropes or talk you through things. You've got to figure it all out on your own. No-one to call at 3am when the little one isn't feeding or if red blotches show up on their skin suddenly. There are many women out there who are pregnant without a mother and so I thought I'd share how I coped and handled that in the hope that maybe it can help someone else live through it.

If I had to summarise my coping strategy in one word it would be this: GRATITUDE!

Focus on what you DO have, not what you don't.
Focus on those things that went well in your life, and not that those that didn't
Focus on who you've become as a result of those experiences and be grateful for that
Focus on what those experiences taught you and what changes or decisions you made as a result
Focus on the fact that you're a living being with senses to expereince this wonderful world we call home, and ejoy those human moments that come each day.