Grief, Grace and Gratitude

Hi! If you stuck around… thank you and welcome back! So I was thinking about my next post, and at first I was going to go into my mom’s story, but then I decided that it’s a good time to talk about my reason for even starting this blog. Before I go into that, I would like to express my severe lack of proper writing skills, coupled with extreme sleep deprivation, so please forgive any grammatical errors and run-on sentences (or feel free to do a quick edit and send it back to me 😘 ) When I think of my mom i think of grace and gratitude which is how the name came about. I originally wanted it to just be called ‘Grace and Gratitude’ but in order to get that domain I’d need to donate my kidney to fund it. Thus, I added ‘Living with’ because that’s how creative I am. Nevertheless, welcome to Living with Grace and Gratitude (is that even grammatically correct? If it isn’t it’s too late now and a cause of my poor planning). Now that we got that part out of the way, let’s begin!

Well, for starters, as I mentioned before I am not a good planner. I absolutely dislike planning because it requires too much thought and energy, and if we’re being totally honest… I’m just lazy. I prefer to sort of figure it out as I go as much as possible, which I guess is ironic now that I have a baby and need to plan EVERYTHING. This is yet another lesson I am forced to learn in my life lol. Needless to say, I decided to start a blog because I wanted a space to share my thoughts on this journey in hopes of healing. I also have time on my hands when my baby naps. Though I should use that time to do chores, like unpack my suitcase from our California trip- yes, I haven’t unpacked yet. I got home on February 5th and my suitcase is still exactly where I left it- staring at me with disgust. I don’t know what’s more embarrassing, the fact that I haven’t unpacked or the fact that I’ve been wearing the same two outfits these last six weeks, so I haven’t found the need to. There you have it, my selfish reason for starting this blog. My non-selfish reason for starting this blog, is that I am very well aware of the many people who are also struggling with some form of grief. Whether it’s infertility, a loss of a loved one, loss of a job, a dream, a friendship, financial burden etc. To be clear, grief is not just about death. Ps: I never intended to do a podcast, I happened to see a button on wordpress that I could create a podcast from my blog post and was like ‘oh, great idea! Let’s do that!’ I mean… is that’s not proof of my lack of planning and preparation?! All my type A people out there are cringing. I know, and I’m deeply sorry. When I shared my first podcast with my brother, his response was “oh shit, when did you decide/prep for that?” My response was “I literally decided today” with laughing emojis. 🤷‍♀️

Back to grief… my first real awareness of what grief felt like was during my six years of infertility and I’ll go into more detail on that in another post. You’re probably thinking, ‘what do you mean, you’ve never experienced grief before then?’ I did, but I just never really understood grief to be anything unrelated to a death- so I guess I would just call it feeling sad or upset at the time. My second big encounter with grief was (and currently still is) my mom’s metastatic breast cancer diagnosis and inevitably her death. It still doesn’t feel real when I say it out loud 😔

Back to my ‘why’ I started this blog. Well, I feel that I have so much to say and instagram only allows 15 second stories – which just isn’t going to cut it for how much I like to talk! Also, how annoying for everyone else to swipe through 100 stories?! I hate that. Anyway, I realized through my many years of grief that being vulnerable and openly talking about my struggles actually helped me heal. That’s not to say you need to share your baggage on social media, but in general it really helps to find a support group or a therapist to help you process through difficult feelings. With that said, I noticed that when I openly shared my IVF journey with others who were on the same path it helped me feel seen, heard and validated. That’s what I want for this podcast. Let it be known, I didn’t share my journey publicly until I moved on to surrogacy (5 years later) so don’t feel bad if you’re not talking about your grief with people. Your life’s journey and your grief is yours. In sharing my triumphs and my tribulations, I hope for you to feel seen, heard and validated and to remember that there is ALWAYS hope.

I don’t have a plan for the direction of this blog or how frequently I will post, but I feel as though it will bloom into what it’s supposed to as we move along. Feel free to give me ideas on topics you’d like to talk about!

As always, thank you for your support and for tuning into (or is it in to?) my beautiful chaos 😊

Podcast name update: as I was making my new instagram page for this podcast I ended up changing the name to “Grief, Grace and Gratitude” I purchased the new domain and now I need to figure out how to transfer it to this one 🤦‍♀️ This is what happens with me. I don’t properly plan and then I change my mind a million times so here we are lol welcome to my neurotic mind! 😉