by Tara Shafer posted in Parenting

I've been carrying around a secret for years.
Bereaved moms go to great lengths to secretly beat themselves up. For years.
Don't let them.
More than a decade ago, my son was stillborn. Shortly thereafter, I faced a medical crisis. In the several years that followed I experienced two additional healthy pregnancies. The integration of pain, loss, joy, stress, and uncertainty took a toll.
The immediate trauma of loss and crisis has long since receded from me now. But looking back, I understand better the way I processed it. I understand that I started engaging in lots of adaptive self-defeating behaviors that once ingrained took on a life of their own -- and became quickly maladaptive.

These behaviors were subtle -- they even looked like a normal postpartum response -- until you factor in the degree. The year of my loss and those that followed were fast and furious. I was sick, recuperating, parenting, pregnant, postpartum, etc. In those happy (yes, absolutely) and post-traumatic years (also yes, absolutely), my sleeping habits became insane and decimated my mood. I read that milk production happens even when women are starving in a famine and so my eating habits devolved.
I drifted from friendships I cherished because I felt so unworthy of love or compassion. They let me go because they did not know how to follow me and because I had no words to guide them. So I felt very alone.
I am writing this not to elicit sympathy, but as a loving ca...