Courageous Mothers Community

Team Norah: For the Love

Our daughter, Norah Mae, was born on March 1st. Heaven lent us our perfect little girl for 5 days before she returned to play with the angels. During what was without question the hardest experience of our lives, the Ronald McDonald house provided us a space to gather, connect, and survive. While I was still…

Mindfulness for Loss Moms: Grief with Intention

Did you roll your eyes a little when you read the title of this article? Because, honestly, I did when I wrote it. I’m pretty new to the whole mindfulness thing. I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, about 45 minutes from the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Both my parents had grown up…

Butterflies and Bears: For the Love

This is the second post in our For the Love series! This is a guest post by Amy. _________ After losing Asher, the only time my husband and I weren’t crying was when we were doing something for him or in honor of him. Immediately following our loss we learned that we had to stay…

The Mailbox: An Unexpected Trigger

Hey mama, I want to give you a heads up – especially if you’re just starting your grief journey. Your postal carrier is soon going to be your least favorite person. I’m sure they’re lovely and I know they’re just doing their job, but there are times when they will send you into such a…

A CD for Parents in Honor of Lily: For the Love

I’m so excited to introduce to you our first post in our new For the Love series, about what parents do to honor the memory of their littles that left too soon. Meet Heather! Heather’s Story I lost my 1st baby on Easter Sunday, & it was one of the most traumatic things I’ve ever…

For the Love: New Blog Post Series on Honoring Our Littles

In this tight-knit and supportive community of loss moms, I’ve seen so many examples and read so many stories about what moms have been compelled to do after losing a baby, whether through miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal or child loss. For me, it was blogging on LettersToJonah.com, and creating this site. For others, it’s starting nonprofits,…

The Post-Loss Identity Crisis

We’ve all heard about the stages of grief, and I’m assuming we’ve all experienced the nonlinear way we cycle through all of the stages. I mean, heck, sometimes I hit all of them in one day. There’s another one, though, that I’m not sure we talk about enough… It’s the change in identity. We look…

How Do You Honor Your Child’s Memory?

It’s hard to believe it’s already been 4 1/2 months since we lost our son, Brady John. In many ways, it feels like it happened yesterday. Yet, I feel as if I am 100 years older. I’m sure many of you experience this same feeling of time warp. Over the past few months, we’ve done…

Donating After Loss

A couple of hours after Mina was born, before I even got to see her for the first time, the nurses in the maternity ward said I should start trying to pump breast milk. They warned that I probably wouldn’t get anything for a few days, especially because Mina was born so prematurely. To everyone’s…

On Ignoring & Facing Grief

I’m a reader. I love how I can fall into a work of fiction and let my mind hang out there for a while, as well as how I can be inspired or learn something new from nonfiction. I’ve been in love with books since I learned to read, and was an English major in…

What does “healing” mean to you?

I wrote a post recently on Letters to Jonah about healing, and about what that word means to me. I feel like it’s important, so I’m sharing it here! In the post, I talked about how I’ll never be “healed,” but there are certain things that I can do that feel like healing – that…

Guest Post: Dealing with Unsolicited TTC Advice

In general, I try not to advise people on things that I don’t have personal experience with. For example, one of my best friends is a type 1 diabetic. I don’t sit there and tell her what she can and cannot eat. I don’t offer her advice on how to maintain her blood sugar. I…