Making Time to Process Grief
Grief comes in countless forms. You can grieve the loss of a child; a parent, or other loved one. Grief can include mourning the loss of future hopes and dreams as well. Whether you're dealing with the loss of a parent or pregnancy, an unexpected diagnosis, or the death of a dream, grief has touched us all along our journey of motherhood.
On the Wire Talk podcast this past week, Judy Wolfe shared that America is “the #1 death-denying society”. We simply don’t have time to stop and process death. That often means ignoring grief, stuffing it down and acting as though everything is fine. We convince ourselves that we didn’t really want that future, that our dream didn’t matter, that our hope was silly, misguided, or unwise. We are so busy and have so many other demands on our hearts and our days that it can seem there isn’t time to sit in our grief and process all we are feeling.
As moms our natural tendency is to slap on a Band-Aid, fix the hurt, and get on with business of life. But in grief we cannot simply “fix” the pain, we need to walk through it. When a loved one or a future hope or dream dies, we must slow down. We must process. We need to give ourselves permission to mourn a future that is forever changed.
Maybe your hope dies a little with each passing month that you do not become pregnant, or maybe they slipped away when you lost a pregnancy to miscarriage or stillbirth. Maybe your dreams died when you received a diagnosis that meant having a “normal” child was not in the cards for your family, or when your marriage dissolved, or when your adoption fell through.
Whatever it is that you are grieving in this season, slow down and feel the pain. Journal about it, cry out to God about it, talk about what you are going through with a friend. There are no shortcuts to healing, but I promise you momma, eventually we all come out on the other side.
