One of the most painful parts of grief is not always the grief itself. Sometimes it is the silence that can begin to grow around it. After miscarriage, stillbirth, infant loss, or difficult pregnancy experiences, many mothers quietly notice the same thing. People who once felt close suddenly seem uncertain. Conversations become awkward. Invitations slow down. Some friends stop checking in altogether, not because they are cruel, but because they simply do not know how to s

Understanding parental dysregulation, nervous system overwhelm, and the fight, flight, freeze response. When Your Child’s Distress Feels Emotionally Overwhelming Many parents expect parenting to be emotionally demanding. What they do not expect is how overwhelming it can sometimes feel when their child cries, screams, protests, withdraws, or becomes emotionally distressed. For some parents, their child’s distress can trigger feelings of panic, anger, shutdown, helplessness, o

As human beings, we tend to organise life around an expected sequence of events. We anticipate beginnings before endings. We expect birth to precede death. We expect a life to unfold gradually through relationship, experience, identity and belonging before its eventual ending arrives. But what happens when death comes before birth?

The Depth of Grief There are some experiences that sit outside the edges of ordinary language. The death of a baby is one of them. It reshapes everything quietly and completely, often without the world around her fully noticing. From the outside, she may look the same. Inside, nothing is as it was. If you are speaking to her, really speaking to her, it helps to understand what lives beneath the surface. She wants to speak freely. Not in fragments. Not in ways that make others

There is something quietly confronting about the 11-minute animated Disney movie, ‘Versa’, not because it demands attention in a dramatic way, but because it draws you into a space many instinctively turn away from; the devastating stillness that follows the death of a baby just before birth. Versa helps illustrate the emotional experiences of Malcon Pierce and his wife Keely Tateossian, whose son, Cooper, died at full term on his due date. Theirs is a loss that defies compre

Honouring Grief for Couples and Sole Parents This reflection is written primarily for couples who are in relationship together and who may still engage with Valentines Day in its traditional sense. At the same time, it is important to name that sole parents, and those grieving without a partner alongside them, carry the same depth of love, attachment and heartbreak. The loss of a baby during pregnancy or shortly after birth holds equal weight, regardless of relationship statu