Marisa Renee Lee is the author of Grief is Love: Living with Loss, a book that guides readers through the pain of loss and offers a unique perspective on what healing truly means. Together, Sarah and Marisa explore the complexities of grief, including the need to feel difficult emotions and the role of self care and supportive relationships in the healing process.
In a year with a pandemic, wildfires, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and more, it can be easy to fall into despair, sadness, or anger. Even if you’re reading this years from now, things can go wrong—and they often do. People pass on, projects go under, businesses are forced to change. Part of the work of being human is reconciling with all that is beyond our control. Here’s a practical exercise to understand what’s within your control, and how to use it.
Our culture is shockingly poor at making any space for the experience, or even the possibility, of loss and grief. It’s no wonder that we protect the secret of pregnancy (and ourselves) until we feel we’ll receive a warmer, safer reception. We may have heard these messages enough over the years through pervasive cultural norms and experiences that we are telling ourselves the same things, to make it easier. To make it less painful. But what if this cultural norm does not actually serve us well? What if it isolates us when what we really need is connection and silences us when we need a voice?
Pregnancy loss is a broad term that encompasses the loss of life of any embryo, fetus, or unborn baby. The most common type of pregnancy loss is miscarriage, affecting up to 50% of all pregnancies. Put another way, every other woman you know who has been pregnant has likely experienced some form of pregnancy loss.
Arianna Taboada is a maternity leave researcher and expert. She helps entrepreneurs build their own maternity leaves when neither work nor country provide support. In this interview, we talk about everything from grief to loneliness to overwhelm, and how to create your own framework to make it through the transition to motherhood.
