I didn’t know last year that there was an International Bereaved Mother’s Day celebrated the Sunday BEFORE the U.S. Mother’s Day.
I hope that my bereaved mother friends took advantage of that day to think about and honor their missing child(ren).
But we still have to make it through tomorrow. And that can be very challenging.
I wrote this last year: Mother’s Day as a Bereaved Mother
Some days I go gangbusters-rip through my “To Do” list from top to bottom before lunchtime.
And some days I can barely get up out of the chair in the morning for a second cup of coffee.
It depends.
Most times I have no idea what throws me into a tailspin.
Oh, I’m prepared for the “circle the date on the calendar days” like Mother’s Day (coming up!), Dominic’s birthday, his heaven day and the holidays. But there are random, not-special-occasion-days that plunge my head under a grief wave that I did not see coming.
Maybe it’s the smell of cut grass through an open window or the sound of a motorcycle thrumming at the end of our lane or the sight of trees full of leaves (again-another season he isn’t here). I really don’t know.
The drowning feeling may last five minutes or five hours. All I can do is go with it and hope the wave spits me out sooner rather than later.
And they DO pass.
My heart is always tender, always aware of missing Dominic. But it is better able to join in laughter and celebration than it was even six months ago.
I no longer feel as if I am drowning every moment of every day with only a gasp of air now and then.
Instead I feel like I’m swimming-tired and often out of-sight of shore-but managing most of the time to keep my head above water.
Grief waves come. They will always come. I have to endure the choking, sputtering, frightening, drowning feeling when they do.
But they are not the only thing I feel now.
And for that, I am very grateful.
I write because it’s important to me and because I want to share freely what I feel God is teaching me in this Valley of the Shadow of Death.
I don’t have affiliate links on my blog, don’t sell books, posters or merchandise and have no plans to do so.
But I am jealous of the content I produce. Not jealous because I think it is of high value but jealous because the words are wrung from ny heart each evening to be posted the next morning. Jealous because they reflect MY experience, expose MY heart and contain details of MY journey.
In all the time I’ve been sharing, I have never had a post stolen, to my knowledge. Until the other day when I found another blogger had re-blogged my post, “International Bereaved Mother’s Day” and given credit (appropriately) to where she had found it-on a Facebook page.
I followed the link and yep, there it was-MY post, copied and pasted changed-only to exclude Dominic’s name and replace it with “child”. Even the graphic I chose was used.
I contacted the page and they have agreed to correct the post and add the link to the blog. I appreciate that.
But in responding to my concerns, the page administrator indicated that it had been found and reposted from another page ( I don’t know which one). And that upsets me.
I know social media is risky business and that I can’t stop anyone from doing whatever they want to once I hit “publish”. But I would ask that in this community of bereaved parents we show one another the respect anyone deserves and honor our individual contributions, whatever they may be.
Taking the words of another and passing them off as your own is plagiarism. It is wrong and it is hurtful.
I will keep writing and risking but now I’m on guard and I hate that.
If you are a regular reader/poster/sharer I ask that you help me watch for this in the future.
I want people to share.
That’s the purpose of writing-that one more heart my be encouraged or strengthened for another day in this Valley. So share away!
But please do it honestly 🙂 ❤
Don’t judge me but in an effort to add a bit of color to my entryway and make peace with the fact that goats eat EVERYTHING-I’ve created pots of colorful silk arrangements. And if I do say so myself, they look pretty authentic as long as you don’t examine them too closely.
This morning I woke to find my carefully arranged fake flowers strewn across my front yard. Strong winds during the night had lifted them out of the pots and carried them everywhere-betraying their true nature.
No pretending now.
As I stooped down to gather the remnants and reposition them I thought about how much of my own life is spent trying to look better than I really am. How often am I arranging “fake flowers” in an effort to fool the eye of the beholder?
And who am I trying to impress anyway?
When the winds of life come blowing hard, all that “fake me” gets stripped away. I’m not strong enough to withstand the wind and keep pretending.
It hardly seemed like a gift at the time, but when Dominic left us, I realized that I had been utterly exposed-every false thing was stripped away and I was standing, defenseless and naked-emotions everywhere, my ability to “keep up appearances” absolutely GONE.
For a time I no longer tried to curate my life so it met with others’ approval.
But old habits die hard and I find myself slipping back into the rut of trying to be something I’m not. Pride clings to every pore and insists that if I don’t do the right thing, say the right thing and look the part, people will turn away.
Wouldn’t it just be better if I was real ALL the time?
Wouldn’t my relationships be stronger if they were built on honest sharing and authentic connections?
I have learned through the years that God does not want just our happy; He also really wants our sad. Everything is not fine, and God wants to hear about it. He is drawn to us when we’re mourning and blesses us in a special way. God is not up there minimizing our pain and comparing it to others who have it worse than we do. God wants all pain to be surrendered to Him, and He has the capacity to respond to it all with infinite compassion.
~Esther Fleece, No More Faking Fine, p. 35
So I’m taking back the gift of authenticity that was purchased at such high cost.
I’m re-embracing the honesty that being stripped of all pretense exposed.
I’m keeping my fake flowers but I’m ditching the fake me.
“A joy-filled heart is curative balm, but a broken spirit hurts all the way to the bone.” ~Proverbs 17:22 VOICE
Laughter is good for my heart. Not just my physical blood-pumping organ, but the emotional center of my being.
And in this Valley of the Shadow of Death, laughter can be a real life-saver.
It’s not betraying Dominic-although it kind of felt that way in the first few weeks-it’s honoring his sense of humor and celebrating his life.
Our family spent hours laughing around the table, in the living room and passing wry texts back and forth.
I firmly believe there will be laughter in Heaven. I think that part of joy is great big belly laughs that will shake me from head to toe.
In the meantime, I’m going to keep practicing down here.
I know that others want desperately me to be “better”. They want me to be happy and carefree and back to the Melanie they knew before child loss.
And not just for their sake, for mine too.
It’s hard to watch someone you care about in pain.
But my reality has been forever changed.
Read the rest here: Love Doesn’t End
International Bereaved Mother’s Day is observed the Sunday before Mother’s Day in the United States. This year it’s Sunday, [May 4, 2025].
I didn’t even know such a day existed until I was a mom that needed it.
For those of us who have children in heaven, setting aside a day to acknowledge that unique mother/child relationship is helpful.
Traditional Mother’s Day is meant to be a time of celebration. A day when children send cards or flowers or give gifts to honor their mom and let her know that years spent pouring into their lives are appreciated.
Lots of church pews and restaurant tables are filled with family as children come home to be with mom.
But Dominic can’t come home.
That makes Mother’s Day complicated for me.
It means that while I am thrilled to spend it with the children who can make it home, there is always a tinge of sadness to the celebration. And I hate that. Because they deserve a whole-hearted mama.
So I’m thankful this other day exists. Thankful for a day when I can think about and speak about and embrace the child that won’t be with me next weekend.
Because Dominic is STILL my son. He is still very much a part of my heart. And I need to be able to speak that aloud for others to hear.
Some mamas will be drawing or painting hearts on their hands and writing their missing child’s name inside as a beautiful outward testimony to an inward reality. Every day we carry our missing child in our hearts.
So if you know a bereaved mama, give her a hug Sunday.
Make time and give space for her to share.
And then listen, love and lift her up.
I bend down and bump my head against memories.
“Mama, look at THAT!”
“Have you ever seen one of those?”
“Is it true toads give you warts? He lives under that rock. Don’t move it-let him live there because he eats bugs!”
“Why is the tail blue? What happens when it breaks off?”
Young boys found toads and luna moths, blue-tailed skinks and lizards Older boys hid with air-soft guns to ambush the other team. Young men changed oil and car parts.
And one summer a laughing Dominic lifted me high in the backhoe bucket so I could paint the top trim of the house.
Synapses fire and lightning flashes through my brain in seconds. ONE corner of my house-all this.
Every room holds memories. Every footfall echoes past days. Every window frames some precious vignette in my mind’s eye.
Inescapable.
Most days I’ve learned to turn down the volume. But today it would not be denied.
And I think, “How would I have survived those precious, precious years if I had known what was coming?”
Thank God I didn’t.
I wrote this post after hearing a radio interview in which the guest said, “You can only hold onto what you refuse to let go of” in reference to clinging to what was truly important in life.
It struck a chord deep in my heart because as the weeks turn to months and then to years, I’m realizing I must hold onto every bit of Dominic that I can.
Because no matter how much I wish it were different, time has a way of washing our minds clean of things we don’t cling to with both hands.
Those hours before I planted one last kiss on my son’s forehead, I held his hand.
I nodded at the people filing past to pay their respects with my arm tucked behind me, desperate to cling to my child.
Read the rest here: You Can Only Hold On To What You Refuse to Let Go Of
My grandmother had two sisters who didn’t have any children.
They were often tapped as babysitters when someone in the family needed to leave their kids home for an extended period of time. And while my aunts meant well, and certainly were never hateful or cruel, there was a giant gap between what they THOUGHT they knew about children and what they ACTUALLY knew.
So many sentences began with, “If you were my child….” But I wasn’t. And the boundaries set between me and my parents had been hashed out through trial and error in real time in real life-not some hypothetical perfect world.
It’s like that in my grief journey as well.
There have been many well-meaning but woefully uninformed people who offered advice. Some of it was helpful but most of it was predicated on misinformation and lack of real-life experience.
The MOST helpful advice has come from fellow bereaved parents.
They share their hearts and their hopes, their failures and their victories, their fears and their faith. They don’t have to-they could simply focus on their own pain and refuse to offer aid.
But moms and dads a few steps ahead of me in the Valley turn back and hold out a hand and say, “This way. I’m right here with you. You can make it!”
And for that I am oh. so. thankful.
thelifeididntchoose 