I want to encourage you to search for joy in the ways you can.

Often, when a mom feels joy, she can immediately feel guilty that how she is having any joy because her child died. How can she laugh when your baby is dead? She’s a horrible mother for laughing, does this mean she is forgetting?

So many thoughts can race through your brain if you find any sort of joy.
And yet, joy, laughter, and lightness can be the things that fill you up so that you can ride the next waves of grief. If you don’t allow any joy in, it just gets heavier and heavier and you can start to wonder what’s the point and purpose. Well, you can wonder that no matter why.

In today’s episode, we are joined by my friend, Marisa Koivisto. Join us as Marisa tells her story of her experience with grief and loss. The time when she was alone without support from people - being isolated from friends, family, and church - as she and her family lived far while her husband was serving in the US Navy. She shared her thoughts on realizing what really matters in life, how to move forward, and how self-care can be so meaningful.

We are all delusional.

This idea is what keeps coming up for me.
How do you see the world around you? Your imagination might be playing, and we make up things in our minds. You question whether this thing is a reality or not.

You may think you are being delusional but, in most cases, you are not. The best part of being delusional is having two options: being delusional in your own suffering or learning how to live and carry your grief.

Welcome to another episode of the Grieving Moms Podcast. In today’s episode, I will share what I learned at Grieving Moms Haven Retreat. Tune in, as I share the lessons and the experiences, and what we did during the retreat.

Gloria has always dreamed about being a mom, folding her cute laundry, and having so much love in her life. But fast forward to May of 2012 when her daughter was born, and it was the last thing she thought it would be. Gloria felt so disconnected. She disconnected from her daughter, from her life, from herself. Gloria felt a lot of heaviness from that year onwards.

Your life is forever changed. You are no longer the Megan that you were on May 26th, or even May 27th before 9:17 am. You are now a mother who knows trauma, grief, death, and the naivety that bad things happen to other people are stripped from your eyes. This will feel like a terrible thing for a long time. You will long to be your old self. You will hate your new life and normal. In time, you will learn to love who you are, to have compassion for your experience, and to grieve the loss of that part of you, but also learn how you’ve changed and become a better person because you’ve experienced such horrific darkness.

Your life is forever changed. You are no longer the Megan that you were on May 26th, or even May 27th before 9:17 am. You are now a mother who knows trauma, grief, death, and the naivety that bad things happen to other people are stripped from your eyes. This will feel like a terrible thing for a long time. You will long to be your old self. You will hate your new life and normal. In time, you will learn to love who you are, to have compassion for your experience, and to grieve the loss of that part of you, but also learn how you’ve changed and become a better person because you’ve experienced such horrific darkness.

Since it’s Pediatric Cancer Awareness Month in September, I have a very special guest on today, Sahar Shariati, to talk about their story before and after her son was diagnosed with pediatric cancer.