First of all, I don’t wanna hear about how @chrissyteigen and @johnlegend are handling the loss of their child. That’s their business.

What I want to say is that families who suffer miscarriage are almost always silenced and told to hide their pain.

It’s a death in the family. And often we don’t even get a body.

We don’t get a funeral. We don’t don’t get a wake or reception to receive the support and hugs of loved ones.

Well sometimes if you’re lucky you DO get a funeral. If you’re lucky.

At most, most of us get hushed conversations with a trusted friend or family member, some murmurs among your community.

What families who lose a baby often miss out on is the full grieving process, which for other deaths, involves some kind of memorial, a reflection upon the deceased’s life, ceremony, ritual.

If someone publicly sharing their infant loss makes you uncomfortable, that’s a you problem.

And if you try to shame or silence a grieving parent on main for sharing their loss, you’re making it harder for others to others to go through their own grieving process, however it may look.

Everyone knows me as a boy mom bc of my three little guys. But the truth is I also have 2 daughters who left me before I had a chance to say hello.

We grieved openly about them both. We shared with family and friends and our church community. Openly. We held space for them and in the process, allowed others who had been silenced to share their losses as well. Some decades old.

We named them both and even sent death announcements to our families so they would know our daughter’s names and their meanings. It’s also why all of our boys have birth announcements aren’t the picture kind - they are all script and we include a separate photo.

So that all of our children have the same kind of announcement.

I’m sure people were about this. But we did it bc it helped us go through all of the stages of grief. And I can honestly say my husband and I are fully healed from both experiences.

Let people grieve.

P.S. also never in your life tell someone who’s grieving a miscarriage any variation of the following:

“It’s okay - someday you’ll have a real baby and this will all be worth it.”

Never. Ever.

Unless I wholly imagined my daughters, they are very real. And the prospect of a future living child has nothing to do with them. My living children are not my consolation prize. They are their own persons, just as Violet and Ruby are.

(Deleted and reposted - I accidentally wrote Grace, which is Violet’s middle name, instead of Ruby).