Within the first few days after delivering Nathan stillborn, I received a visit from Sam. Sam’s daughter, Selena, was stillborn in 2022 (check out Selena’s Lovies on Facebook!). She asked me if there was anything I wanted or needed to talk about. Sitting on my couch, still heavily bleeding and wearing a postpartum diaper, I blurted out the words that had been replaying in my mind but had not came out of my mouth: “I don’t feel like a mom.”

I was shocked at how easily that sentence came out to someone I had just met. Since then, Sam has become someone I confide in frequently, and I feel comfortable telling her all of the thoughts and feelings that swim around in my head. She is a light in this world and in the loss mom community.

I first began talking about my experience with grief in a Facebook post one month after Nathan was born, just as a way to acknowledge the day and shed light on the feelings I was experiencing. One month later, I posted a TikTok sharing things about Nathan that I would want other people to know. While the video is nowhere near viral and my TikTok following is very small compared to bigger creators, I believe that video was seen by the people needing it most.

Over the last few months, I have connected with countless loss moms (and some dads, too) via social media. Talking to others who have experienced the loss of their baby is probably what has helped me the most. I have experienced other losses throughout my life, but the grief over losing a child is something incomparable to anything I have ever felt. Additionally, the entire experience of having a stillborn is unique in itself. Having people who can relate to this specific experience and type of grief has been extremely beneficial in my journey.

As I told Sam, I did not feel like a mother. I knew I was pregnant, and I knew I had given birth. I was not in denial about these things, but I also knew that I didn’t have a baby to care for. Nathan is my first child, so I have no other experience with pregnancy or motherhood. He was all I had, and he was taken away from me.

To me, the term “mother” didn’t feel right. It has come to be something I identify with most days, but that has taken a lot of therapy sessions. I can’t relate to the mother awake in the middle of the night with her teething baby, but I know what it feels like to have a baby kick your bladder from the inside. I can’t relate to the overwhelmed mother in the grocery store, but I know the nervous excitement of seeing a positive pregnancy test. I can’t relate to the mother donating clothes her children have grown out of, but I have a nursery in my home that has never been used. I know the feeling of having an epidural placed. I know what contractions feel like. I know the primal, powerful feeling of pushing a baby out. What I do not know, however, is what it is like to mother a living child.

Through the community of stillbirth parents, I have found that I am not alone in what I like to call “the in between.” Where I am a mother, but I don’t quite relate to mothers who only have living children. I pray that one day I get the chance to parent a living child and experience everything that entails, even the hardest parts. When that day comes, I know I will still feel the weight of Nathan’s absence. My grief over his loss will always exist because the love I have for him will always exist.

In this season of mourning my precious boy and waiting to give him a sibling here on Earth, I will sit in the “in between,” where I have found solace in this circle of bereaved parents. This is not what parenthood is supposed to look like, but if you are in the “in between” with me, know that you are not alone. There is a whole community of parents just like us, grieving and growing together.