By Jane Rollins
I remember when I first learned of Bereaved Mother’s Day. It was at a Share Parents of Utah event and my new friends explained the holiday to me. They said it was always the first Sunday in May, making it land the week before Mother’s Day. It was a day intended to recognize grieving mothers — those who would struggle the following week when they would be longing for their loss children.
I was new to the bereaved club. My son had passed not quite a year before. My last Mother’s Day had been a happy one, one where I was blissfully pregnant and ignorant to the trials that would befall me only weeks later. I had two young kids who gave me gifts, including cards with handwritten notes with varying levels of legibility. My husband made me a nice breakfast and gave me flowers and chocolate — an expected standard which nonetheless remains endearing every year.
But as Mother’s Day approached the year following my third child’s death, a day which once held endearment now held dread. I knew I needed to keep the day happy for my living children who still wanted to write me cards and give me the presents they had worked hard on at school. I fortunately had a good relationship with my own mother and looked forward to honoring her that day as well. But my personal longing for my baby complicated the joy that the holiday was intended to bring.
Enter International Bereaved Mother’s Day.
This quiet holiday gave me a day where I didn’t have to hold myself together for anyone else’s expectations. I didn’t need to acknowledge anyone else but me and my baby. This day gave me space to focus only on my relationship with my missing child and mourn him as much as I wanted to. I could simply cry and that was appropriate. I was no stranger to crying.
I hadn’t heard of the holiday until I was a bereaved mother myself. It’s a relatively new holiday, created in 2010 by Carly Marie Dudley. She had lost her stillborn son Christian in 2007. She founded Bereaved Mother’s Day to fill the need she saw in the loss community for a day dedicated “to honor and celebrate the mothers who carry some, perhaps all, of their children in their hearts rather than their arms.” (-Carly Marie Dudley, Still Standing Magazine)
Dudley explained her reasoning behind the need for this holiday. “The traditional Mother’s Day has proven to be an emotionally exhausting day for so many mothers around the world. Just because your child died does not mean that you are not a mother anymore. You are your child’s mother forever, and people need to start recognizing this fact.
“It is a day for us to take some time out and look at their ultrasound photos, polish their urns, lay flowers at their graves, visit unique places, and light candles in their memory. It is our day to be recognized as the beautiful mothers that we are.” (-Carly Marie Dudley, Still Standing Magazine)
Not many Mothers — or people, for that matter — know or recognize this holiday. However, that didn’t stop me from honoring it once I learned about Bereaved Mother’s Day. I lit my memorial candle that I save for special occasions and held a moment of silence with my family for my baby. The rest of the world carried on like it was a typical Sunday, but my heart knew it was a day for my battered soul. It was cathartic to remember silently, just like my son’s earthly existence had been as a stillborn.
This will be my fourth Bereaved Mother’s Day and my fourth Mother’s Day without my eternal baby. I want to say it gets easier, but the truth is it gets different. I still long for my son, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Well intentioned friends and family want me to “get over it” and “move on”, but it doesn’t work that way for me. My love for him isn’t going to go away, so why should my grief? That grief has found a place in a little pocket in my heart, tucked inside a cozy corner where it doesn’t consume me the way it used to.
I know it’s still there though, a constant companion, a tinted filter to my life. But that tint also makes my life look more beautiful, more rich, more meaningful. It reminds me to soak in every moment and value the little things, like the excitement my living children will have when they give me their slightly more legible Mother’s Day cards this year.
