From How to Survive Mother's Day (Top Ten List)...

5. Set aside time to grieve.

No matter what you do, your heart is going to be heavy around Mother’s Day. There is simply no way to get around this. While the rest of the world is celebrating the joys of motherhood, your arms remain empty. Being denied motherhood when you desperately want to become a mother is painful enough. Having the rest of the world rub your face in the fact that you are (seemingly) the only one left out of celebrating motherhood is enough to test the limits of even the strongest of women.

If you don’t set aside time to grieve, you will start to feel like a pressure cooker. The pressure will continue to build inside until something knocks the lid off. Then, your emotions will go exploding all over whoever is unlucky enough to be around when this happens. That is not fair to either you or your loved ones. Rather than holding the pain inside until it explodes, set aside time to pour out the pain in a way that you can control.

Western society does very little to teach people how to grieve. It is okay to cry at a funeral (but not too much), and then we are supposed to just move on with our lives. Unfortunately, grief does not fit into the box that society has set up for it. Grief is not limited to a death in the family, and it is not something that can be expressed in an hour or two and then just go away. Grieving is a process, and it cannot be short-circuited. While grieving is not fun, it is necessary in order to heal from any losses that life throws your way.

I did some research on line so I could post about the stages of grief, and I stumbled upon this gem from Beware the 5 Stages of "Grief":

One common definition of Grief Work is summarized by the acronym TEAR:

T = To accept the reality of the loss

E = Experience the pain of the loss

A = Adjust to the new environment without the lost object

R = Reinvest in the new reality

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Mother’s Day is a time that makes the feelings of loss even more pronounced, which makes it the perfect time to focus on your grief work. This is your “E” time – Experience the pain of the loss. As you allow yourself to experience the pain, you will move through the grieving process. As I pointed out in Surviving the Wait: Grieving Your Losses, adopting cures childlessness, NOT infertility. You will need to work through this grieving process a some point in your life. Investing in the grieving process now will result in big dividends when your child arrives.

Related Topics:

• Top Ten List: Surviving Mother’s Day



• Surviving Mother’s Day Series


• Surviving the Wait: Christmas, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day



• Mother's Day Hard All Around