Episode Title: The In-Between Self: What Grief Teaches You About Who You Are Now

Episode Summary:

In this episode of The Pregnancy Loss and Motherhood Podcast, Today I’m sharing three truths that changed me after losing my daughter Evelyn, truths that helped me breathe again, helped me make the choice to keep going, and helped me understand that identity after loss is not about going back—it’s about becoming.

In this episode, we explore:

• How motherhood doesn’t begin or end with a heartbeat
• Why your identity feels shattered after loss
• The quiet, invisible, misunderstood reality of life after baby loss
• The power of narrative (and how trauma forces us to rewrite our story)
• Why you're not broken—you’re becoming someone new
• How grief shapes you, but does not define you

This is for you if you’ve ever looked in the mirror and thought, “I don’t know who I am anymore,” or if guilt, softness, anger, jealousy, or numbness has made you question who you’re becoming after your baby died.

Take a breath with me. You don’t have to have it all figured out.

You just have to be here.

Links + Resources:

• 💌 Visit the Evelyn James Shop on Etsy!
• 🧡 Follow us on TikTok!! @pregnancyloss.motherhood

Hey love, welcome back to the Pregnancy Laws and Motherhood podcast. If you're here today, whether it's your first time or your 100th time, I just want to say that I'm glad you're here truly. And speaking of, if you're here for the 100th time, we are almost to our 100th episode and that is so exciting. If you've been here a while, you know that I take breaks often because this is a heavy topic, a heavy subject, and it takes a lot out of me.

But I am really excited to be here today and I'm really excited to dive into our episode, which is just, Who Am I Now? Which we did an episode on this, but it's been about a year. So it's three truths that changed me after losing a baby. Okay.

So, and honestly, today I am doing a video recording having done that in a while, but we are going to start recording every single episode and we're going to put it up on our YouTube channel at Pregnance. I don't know what my thing is anymore. I'm to have to check on that if it's named after the podcast or the company. So here we are. Just us. And we're going to talk about something that sits right at the center of life after baby loss. And that's who am I now? Who am I?

I carried the baby? Who am I when I carried the baby who isn't here? Who am I when I can't go back to the woman I was but I don't quite recognize who I'm becoming? If you've ever looked in the mirror and thought I don't know myself anymore or if you've carried guilt, shame, jealousy, anger, confusion about who you've become since the loss, this episode is definitely for you. So just take a breath with me.

Okay, let's talk. Maybe that was more for me. So the first part I want to jump into is kind of motherhood isn't what we were told. Okay. Motherhood doesn't begin or end with a heartbeat. It lives in the love we carry. But that is not a message that I knew to be true until I lost my third daughter, Evelyn. She was stillborn at 40 weeks and five days after a near perfect pregnancy, which may sound similar to your story.

And I think so many of us grew up with a certain picture of motherhood, you know, the one they sell us, soft blankets and happy late night feeds where we don't look exhausted, know, having a baby on our chest and, you know, the tiny fingers wrapped around ours. And I get it. Like, we need those visuals so that we actually go through with motherhood and have children because we do we as humans innately have

A negativity bias where we focus more on negative things and positive things. Right? So, of course, they're going to end date us with all the happy, happy motherhood things, but. I didn't know that this could happen to me because I had 2 healthy babies already and to me. I'm sorry, have a little interrupted right here. Can you 1 2nd.

I mean.

Okay, sorry, my little interrupt this is here with me. So, of course, we are so untrusting when we enter motherhood and we're like, wait a minute. What happened to all these beautiful moments that we were promised? We're missing them in between the lack of sleep and between the lack of support, the lack of resources, the lack of education surrounding what motherhood actually is. And again, you guys, I'm a postpartum inbreed medulla. So.

And of course, being a postpartum doula, like that is where I believe we need more support and where we need people really focusing on just my little, my little two cents there. So when I was pregnant with Evelyn, I imagined all those things and it was really exciting for me because I had a volatile, have a volatile relationship with my mother and a strange relationship. And I don't know, since having two daughters,

before her. my god, three little girls. Like I couldn't imagine anything better. I was so excited. And so I, for that nine and a half, 10 months, I sat there imagining who I would be with her and her sisters. I imagined who she would be with her sisters and me. I imagined her place in the family and where she fit in and how we would do things differently.

I envisioned how bedtime would look and I sat and made plans on how those things would look.

I am it. This is my little, my little boy. My rainbow baby, actually.

So I imagine these things for months. was real. It was a real outcome for me. It was a real identity that I had created surrounding having her as part of our family. And so when she died, was my, like, you know, like my entire identity sank. And the thing about motherhood after loss or just living after you've lost a baby,

is how quiet it is. It feels invisible. It's completely misunderstood and not talked about like it should be considering it's the lead cause of death for newborn or, you know, children in this age. And honestly, it's one of the most complex forms of motherhood there is. We are literally parenting a dead child.

and oftentimes long-living siblings. And that does not seem fathomable. Like, just thinking about that.

I couldn't imagine how I was going to survive. I couldn't imagine what I was going to do or the fact, you know, sitting in the hospital and having to be, you know, made to make all these decisions that have to be made, but having to choose whether my infant's body is cremated or buried.

my god, the decisions that I've had to live with after my child died is

I don't know if I have a word for it, guys. I'll have to think about that. here is one of the truths that really helped me.

Make the choice?

to keep going and help me breathe better. And that's just because our babies aren't here doesn't mean we stop being mothers. So initially when Evelyn died, I'm like, I am a mom whose child died. It's like that's the only identity of mine I could see. I know I had two living children at the time as well, but that was the one that was the heaviest.

And I didn't know at the time that I could still be her parent in all the ways that I have grown to parent her.

while she's not here. So it's the reminder that motherhood doesn't require evidence. People outside of you do not get to make judgment. Well, they will, but we don't have to care. You know, it doesn't require seeing a stroller or a diaper bag or...

You know, being told happy Mother's Day by your children, which let's be honest, we tell our kids to tell us that or our spouses or partners tell our kids to tell us that right? It's not it's not a common thing unless you're told to do it. You know, it's. It's not having a picture perfect brunch with their family, you know.

Our quiet motherhood after loss is an invisible love inside of us. Nobody else can see just how much we love our children, our babies that are no longer with us.

You know, motherhood after loss is that longing and aching feeling.

Those are visceral emotions and feelings in our bodies.

just waiting and just like, where's our baby? Where, you know, I just want to hold them. I should be holding them or breastfeeding them.

It's the, you know, motherhood after loss is that new softness that we have.

There's two sides of it. There's a hardening and a softening at the same time. And we talk a lot on my podcast about the duality of loss and grief, the dual emotions we feel, but have never been talked about with us.

It's so many little quiet moments. I mean, as a mom, it comes and goes all day long. There are periods of time and there are seasons of life and there are

Sometimes when we're so busy, we're not aware of it, but they're always there.

So the first truth I really want you to hold today is that you don't have to prove your motherhood. It already exists. You're, you know, it's written in your story in your cells in your soul.

The moment your baby was conceptualized, the moment your baby...

was the moment you were made aware of your baby.

your story was written and the love was there.

Truly.

And there's, I think, too, there's a lot of in between after the loss, you know, you're not.

There's a part of your grieving process in the beginning where you're broken.

You feel like you're broken?

You don't feel like anything could ever bring you joy again. You don't know how you're ever gonna take care of your other children again, or how you're ever gonna go through another cycle of IVF again, or all these things. But you're constantly becoming. Identity after loss isn't about going back, it's about becoming this person, this vision, version of yourself that has lost something so significant.

It makes a lot of human problems insignificant.

And I know this privilege with saying that I know we don't all have the privileges, you know, that each other has. But, after Evelyn died, people would say,

You'll feel like yourself again soon.

Or everything's going to be fine. You'll get back to normal.

And those are really the only types of messages I received. Nothing too crazy, you know, like it was meant to be or anything like that. That would have drove me crazy, but. I didn't want to go back.

To me, before Evelyn, wasn't who I wanted to be. Because the moment I knew I was pregnant with her, I was different.

The woman I was before Evelyn died had never held death, had never...

had a run in with death. think one of the only deaths that I had, two of them, one was when I was like five, my great grandma died. And then when I was pregnant with my second daughter, Violet, my ex died in a tragic accident. And my dog, I know I don't compare animals to babies, but.

Those are the only grief experiences that I had and they were not super close to me. So the me before didn't know grief like this.

But I think it was the version of me who also didn't know love like this either.

I didn't

After the initial stages of grief, didn't necessarily feel broken anymore, but I did feel different.

I feel like I broke in half, right? And I'm working on the rearranging part.

And here's also something that I've been learning in my grad studies and my trauma trainings. Like, there is something called narrative therapy. Okay. Some people refer to it as a narrative identity theory. And it says that traumatic loss disrupts the entire story we've been telling about our lives.

And it forces us to rewrite everything, not from scratch, but from the truth. Okay. And if, you know, I don't know if I've mentioned, but I am, going, you know, back to grad school or going to grad school to get my counseling degree so that I can do this on a, on a bigger stage and in a bigger way to help more women and families.

But this narrative storytelling is something that I was doing, but it was unconscious because I didn't know about this because I wasn't a grad student at the time and I had no idea. But the losses that we've suffered, especially if we consider them traumatic, it disrupts our current life story that we've been living.

And so what do do?

We're forced to look at it in a different way. We're forced to rewrite it in a new way.

So just food for thought. And so the second truth I want to offer you is you're not broken. It may feel like pieces of you are, but you're becoming someone new. And this person may be stronger and softer and wiser and braver and more intuitive than you've ever known.

And just embrace her embrace this person and and keep in mind that it's going to be messy and disorganized. You may not know for years what the point of any of this is if there was even a point however you feel.

Yeah, just we have to learn to live in that in-between place and that in-between self, you know, the uncomfortable place, place.

uncomfortable place where you don't belong in the past and you don't fit comfortably in the present and you don't know who it is you're becoming and it's kind of like an emotional limbo chaos but this in-between stage where the transformation happens like a butterfly like crystalis we're we're in this new new us

And it's very cliche. So funny. I have a butterfly necklace if you're watching this podcast episode. But we talk about how the caterpillar doesn't grow wings. The caterpillar melts and disintegrates and becomes unrecognizable before becoming a butterfly. And so if you don't recognize yourself right now, there's nothing wrong with you.

You're in the middle of becoming and that's if you want to, you know, I think there's a lot of emphasis put on personal growth and things like that, right? Which I get. I'm constantly in that journey because I believe that's, you know, personal development is what helps us grow.

But you're allowed to sit in that in-between place and not know what to do and not do much of anything. You're allowed to sit there and contemplate what you believe, what you want to do, what you're going to look forward to or you're not. That is your right. And there's nothing wrong with that. So I don't want I don't want you to feel like rushed because of the information I'm sharing with you.

And so kind of one of the last segments we'll talk about is like.

The grief kind of refines you. you're not just your loss, you're also your light, the duality that we've talked about over and over again. There's a concept in grief psychology called post-traumatic growth. And I just want to break it down a little bit. Might give you some things to think about, post-traumatic growth is not about everything happens for a reason. It's not toxic positivity. It's not saying your loss made you better. It's saying that the trauma shattered you.

And you in your own time found pieces of yourself you didn't know existed. You find maybe more empathy and clarity. You are able to create boundaries. You're more aware of what really matters. And you have more strength than you ever needed. know, and a lot of the research tells us that many brave mothers experience identity expansion years after the loss. And not because grief wasn't devastating.

But because grief carved out a deeper space within them that we had to fill. And so the last truth I want to leave you with today to hold is grief will shape you, but it doesn't get to define you. Okay. You are not only the mother who lost a baby. You are also a woman or person who's loved deeply. You're a person who is healing. You're a person who is rebuilding. You're a person who is rising. You're a person who is

I don't know whatever your career is your teacher, doula, IT person, you know, you, you might be a mom, a dog mom or a cat mom. You might have other living kids. Like, you have so many identities. And grief is only just 1 part of you, but it affects all of you. And there's there's some.

If this episode resonated with you today, please screen shoot and tag me on Instagram at Evelyn James and co. And if you're willing share share, you know, a way you've changed since your baby has died. You can use hashtag pregnancy loss pregnancy loss and motherhood podcast. Make sure to check out our Etsy shop Evelyn James and co. for all the

Babyloss jewelry and charm necklaces that we've been curating. We're super proud of them. Until next week.