Today is International Bereaved Mother’s Day, which was offically started in 2017 by a mother who lost her child. It takes place the first Sunday in May, one week before the ‘regular’ Mother’s Day in the United States. So, today is a day for mothers like me.
I commemorate my motherhood on both days: Bereaved Mother’s Day and Mother’s Day by doing something I enjoy, spending time with my husband and dog, being good to myself. I don’t have a good relationship with my mother, for many reasons, and in addition, she rarely acknowledges my motherhood and mentions my child even less frequently, so I don’t like spending time with her on either day. But that’s another story. This post is about the other bereaved, and especially the other #stillmothers (mothers who do not have any living children, whose children have all died because of miscarriage, infant loss, stillbirth or as children or adults, from any cause). I wrote a little about being a stillmother here. And today is about us.