Dealing with Grief and Sadness Around Mother’s Day
Mother's Day can be a beautiful day to honor the mothering people in your life. But if you’re building your family still and going through adoption, surrogacy, foster care, or infertility, it can also arrive with a weight that's hard to put into words.
There is grief of not yet holding your child alongside the uncertainty of a match that hasn't come through, an embryo transfer you're still waiting on, a process that moves at its own pace regardless of how ready your heart is. You might have complicated feelings watching everyone else's celebrations while feeling like your own story is still unfolding.
“I remember countless Mother’s Days where I was sad or feeling the lack of not being a mom. The years leading up to finally having our baby, I felt an immense pressure every Mother’s Day that I didn’t have a child. It felt unfair and heavy.”
Urvi Shah, a coach at Inner Serenity Life Coaching, knows this territory intimately. She's offered a few practices below to help you move through the day with more gentleness toward yourself, wherever you are in the journey.
Hold compassion for yourself
Self-compassion is something many of us were never taught, but it may be one of the most important things we can offer ourselves, especially in moments heavy with guilt or grief. It allows you to soften, to accept what is, and to love yourself anyway, even in the middle of the waiting.
If you're in the matching period, the two-week wait after a transfer, or somewhere else in the in-between, this is a practice worth returning to today.
Try this:
Release the sadness
Grief that goes unacknowledged tends to sit heavier. This meditation is designed to help you bring awareness to what you're carrying and gently move that energy toward love, not by dismissing what hurts, but by making space for it.
Try this:
Write through it
Journaling can be a quiet, grounding way to process what you're feeling when words to others feel like too much. There are no right answers here. All you need a is blank page and some space to hear yourself. Here are a few prompts to start:
What is in my control right now?
How can I be in the energy of joy today, even in a small way?
How can I bring myself back to gratitude?
When you're ready, this gratitude meditation can help close the loop:
Try this:
However this day finds you, you are seen here. Your path to parenthood is real, and so is everything you're feeling along the way.