Today we're going to talk about Mother’s Day. I shared in this episode that you have people in your life who are loving you and caring for you, but remember that you also get to care for yourself. You can take the steps forward holding grief and all the pain as valid, and also reaching for joy, and being present with your living children. It’s that dichotomy of grief and joy, pain and lightness, holding all of it together. It’s all okay to be there at one time. It doesn’t have to all be a pain.

Today we're going to talk about the anxiety after your child dies. I shared in this episode the three parts of anxiety. I definitely can go way deeper into this and really help move forward things with anxiety with you but I wanted to share a little bit, so that I could start being useful for you right now.

Shifts and changes of grief. Listen as Sally shares her experience of navigating the loss of her son - Joey - during the pandemic time. Joey was diagnosed with Spastic Cerebral Palsy and lived with Sally for 38 years.

How Sally grieved more and felt the intensity of her emotions of grief lead her to the Grieving Moms Haven group and learned that there are different tools that can help her.

Today we're going to talk about six reasons grieving moms get stuck inside of grief. I am excited about this episode because I think all of these reasons are things that stop moms from truly getting the help that they need. And my mission is to help encourage you to get that help, to get that support, to not do this alone, and to give you tools and resources to do that because this is the hardest thing you'll ever, ever walk through in.

You know when people come up to you and say you are so strong, I couldn’t imagine going through what you are going through, and you seem to be doing so well…and you feel broken and shattered inside and not strong at all?

Maybe you say this to yourself though. That you need to be strong for your kids. That you have a spouse that needs your help, kids that need your help, or a job that’s relying on you.

So you think you need to be strong, that you need to push through. Saying we need to be strong is one of the most damaging things we can say in grief, and as humans.

I get if you are using this strength and pushing through grief right now, you might be thinking, digging and pushing through is the only way I’m surviving right now, so listen in please, and I’ll share some reasons why we need to change our perception of strength, and how the current narrative around strength is a detriment to grief.

To recap for those of you who don’t know, my husband Justin and I bought a school bus in July 2020 after deciding in November 2019 that we wanted to buy one and convert it into a schoolie. It’s really because of Aria that this came about. Because of her death, we learned that life is truly short, and my husband, I, or any of our other kids could die. So we wanted to live our dreams now, not in retirement, and figure out a way to spend more time with our kids, and as a family. And doing this school bus and traveling in the country was a huge dream that with a ton of work, effort, and just taking steps forward has happened for us.

Natalie Weaver, the mom of Sophia, shared about her organization and how she started it while her daughter was still alive - knowing that this would be the thing that would honor Sophia when she pass away. The organization kept Natalie going and have her a purpose to continue on.

And it was not an easy path to take on. A lot of challenges and even hate from people who would not try to understand the condition that Sophia has. Challenges from institutions that would not consider providing special needs, accessibility, and equality for medically complex children. The adjustments she and her family have to go through in order to raise and keep Sophia safe and well taken care of.

Today I want to share how to ground yourself when you notice you are activated. But before we dive into that, maybe I should talk about what is activated, and how you know if you are activated.

Because honestly, when I think about when I first started experiencing these kinds of sensations in my body, I just thought I was going crazy and I was going to need to be checked into a mental hospital. The first time I experienced anxiety or even a panic attack, I thought I was going to die, and I kept telling my husband I don’t know what’s wrong with me and I think you might need to bring me in because I don’t know what's happening.

So, I’ll start with how do you know if you’re activated, and what does it mean?

So if I look up the definition of triggered or activated online, it says on dictionary.cambridge.org that triggered means “experiencing a strong emotional reaction of fear, shock, anger, or worry, especially because you are made to remember something bad that has happened in the past:”

Triggers can be anything and so personal to each of us depending on our experiences. Side note. I do not do trigger warnings on anything I post, because it’s impossible to know what everyone's trigger warnings are. Some could be triggered by certain words, some are triggered by certain pictures, events, ways of saying things, or sounds, it can be anything. So I cannot know what people's triggers are.