stillbirthday.com

05/09/2026

I looked for a card today.
The kind to capture what my heart is holding.
Because you know, this weekend and all.
What words would most accurately match though, the most accurate of images, to capture what my heart is holding?

When your eyes meet this image, and when you scroll, the sound from your device is silence.
But we who know, we can hear her.

---
Image by
Debra Lee of The Daughter Wound Project

05/03/2026

The Sunday before Mothers day is Bereaved Mothers day.
Not because we are less than. But because mothering when our beloved babies who are not alive, who not with us in all the ways our mother hearts long for, is so profoundly complex, and this gives us the space to honor both: birth, and bereavement.

May your healing journey be ever so gentle, and may you be gentle with yourselves, healing mothers.

02/21/2026

Microchimerism, discovered in 1893 by German pathologist Georg Schmorl, means specifically to us bereaved mothers, that our very cells hold DNA from our beloved babies.

So in perhaps psychological and spiritual terms, many of us believe our babies will always be part of us, but, it is true in physical terms, as well.

Our babies matter. They are a part of us. And, they change us.

02/21/2026

02/16/2026

Thinking about the little, big light of our remembrance candles, and the zero candle of stillbirthday, the candle I lit at my own beloved baby's grave.

At his ultrasound, I remember the technician telling me that she couldn't find a heartbeat, and how I wanted to tell her to just shush and watch -- just as surely as I knew my baby was not alive, I was sure God was going to breathe life, speak life back into my baby. And then, the ultrasound screen went dark...and so did my whole world. How do I get up off of the crunchy paper of the ultrasound table? How do I tell my man that his beloved baby is not alive? How do I tell my living children their sibling has died, and inside of me? What kind of mother am I? Impossible. Every single thing, felt impossible.

And here we are, friends. Stumbling along each in our own darknesses, daring to believe that somehow, impossibly, our endurance brings a fractal of warmth, a gentle hue of light, along the way. The heartbreak and the mysterious comfort is, you are not alone.

02/01/2026

Hmmm. I want to share something with you, my friends who've chosen to be here in this space with me.

The last post I shared here was a month ago. In a very technical sense, my last post was last year.

Some pages, when there's no movement for a few weeks, we can start to really wonder what's going on.

No movement.

We might refresh the page. Get a little curious, and maybe a little anxious. We may start to reach out. "Are you okay?" we might ask. And alternatively, we might reflect and decide that we don't necessarily think that the page is best for our season at the time and we might feel healthier and/or happier by removing ourselves from the page. Then maybe some of the pages we're on, if we're honest, we really mightn't even notice when there's something of a lull in their activity until some time later.

And now we're in the season of cherubim, aren't we? Folks enjoying the budding naivete of early romance and storefronts are filled with hues of pastel pinks, decadent chocolates, and somewhere in the midst, there's this idea of peaceful, floating little babies with wings.

For friends of our friends here, you know, if you've ever gotten frustrated at a page's silence, wished someone in the virtual space would just validate you, if you've forgotten to see that the "content creator" was a living creation too,

JUST IMAGINE how the entire world stops when a mother searches, impossibly, frantically, desperately, for the evidence, the teeniest of any kind of flutter, any movement, any sign, that her beloved baby is still alive.

Image of the Sistine Madonna, because why do we always cut out the entirety of the work of art that is the mother with her child in her arms? What have we all been thinking those two wee cherubim have been looking at this whole time?

Some of us are desperate for a sign of life. And some of us will remember that desperation for the entirety of our own lives.

Friends of our friends with the platitudes to "just get over it,"

JUST IMAGINE.

12/13/2025

Elizabeth. She struggled with fertility.

She waited well past the 12 weeks to share her news, until she was obviously showing.

Mary, upon learning that she was pregnant, came running to Elizabeth, the infertile woman, the white-knuckling mother.

And this story of a 3rd trimester mother and a 1st trimester mother sharing their truths and their experiences with each other, makes history.

Your struggle with fertility matters. Your 3rd trimester baby, your 2nd and your 1st trimester baby, matters. We impact one another; our stories, even of tragedy, are life-giving when we share them.

If you are grieving and your child died, if your baby died before birth, if the baby you've yearned for hasn't been conceived, your story matters.

The Christmas story is woven with women sharing about their babies and validating one another.

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Incredible Artwork: Mary Ellen Diedrich
Words: stillbirthday