I Will Not Attend Your Baby Shower

Navigating Activating Events Mindfully and Respectfully

Pregnancy announcements. Baby showers. People who conceive without any issues. Pregnant women in your OBGYN’s waiting room. The new baby in the family.

All of these can be activating experiences after a pregnancy loss.

And, unfortunately, people can judge us for these feelings. I remember hearing:

Why can’t you just be happy for her?

Your niece has nothing to do with your miscarriage.

Poor [insert name of friend who seems to have everything she has ever wanted], you should not be jealous of her.

But, these activating moments are very real. We both need and deserve to honor and accept those moments as real emotional moments. These moments, that many in our lives can dismiss, are actually an indication that we are on a path of healing. As we recognize these moments, we are able to set boundaries, honor a difficult emotion, and identify things that interrupt our path through grief.

By ignoring them, or “should-ing” them away, we actually make them worse, not better.

Emily Nagoski, author of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, states that emotions are actually real, and need to be addressed in order to keep oneself out of burnout: “Your emotions are biological events that happen in your body. It’s physiological, real. Emotions are not just in your head. They are all over your body, in your chemistry.”¹