132: Stillbirth Grief Was Running My Life for 10 Years- I Just Didn't Know It

There's a particular kind of grief that doesn't announce itself.

It doesn't look like crying in your car or canceling plans because you can't get out of bed. It looks like showing up. Functioning. Running your business, raising your kids, being a wife, going to conferences. It looks, from the outside, like someone who is doing okay.

And then you sit down at a table with a blank piece of paper and a glue stick, and suddenly, you can't move.

That was me. And it took sitting in that chair — at a vision board exercise at a salon industry conference, of all places — to realize that grief had been quietly running my life for more than a decade.

What I Didn't Know Was Happening

I lost my twin girls at 32 weeks. That loss happened in 1999, and at the time, there weren't many places to turn. No social media, no Zoom support groups, no online communities. There was an in-person support group I couldn't always get to, and eventually a therapist I started seeing a few years later.

Therapy helped. I want to be clear about that. But some things about that loss were never fully addressed — not out loud, not in a way that I could hear and feel and release.

So instead, without consciously choosing it, I made a decision my heart quietly made for me: I stopped dreaming about the future.

Wanting things felt dangerous. Not because I was broken. Not because I couldn't function. But because I had learned, in the most painful way imaginable, that the future is not a promise. That you can want something with your whole heart and still have it taken from you in a moment.

So I stayed small. Just today. Just right now. Nothing too far ahead, nothing too big, nothing too risky.

I thought I was protecting myself.

The Moment I Finally Saw It

At a business conference for the salon industry I owned at the time, the very first exercise was a vision board. Magazines, scissors, glue sticks, the whole thing. Every other person in that room was energized, laughing, cutting out diamond rings and beach homes and vacations.

My page was blank.

I sat there frozen while everyone around me dreamed freely, and I didn't understand what was wrong with me. I wasn't sad. I wasn't thinking about my girls in that moment. I just... couldn't move.

That's when the life coach facilitating the event came and sat down beside me. She looked at my blank page and said, simply, "What's going on here?"

Something about the way she asked — no pressure, just curiosity and kindness — opened something in me.

What came out surprised me. I heard myself say out loud, for the first time, that I hadn't let myself dream in years. That I was living inside a controlled bubble because my grief had taught me that hope was risky.

I was cheating my husband out of a wife who could show up for their future together. I was cheating my kids out of a mom who could dream alongside them. I was cheating myself out of the life that was still possible — still waiting — if only I could let myself want it.

What Grief Can Look Like When It Hides

One of the things I talk about in Episode 132 of the Navigating Baby Loss podcast is how sneaky unaddressed grief can be.

It doesn't always look like you think it should. It doesn't always look like depression, or grief attacks, or visible signs of suffering. Sometimes it looks like a woman who seems to be doing just fine — functioning, productive, capable — but who has quietly made her world smaller and smaller without even realizing it.

It can look like not wanting to travel because what if something happens. Not talking about the future because planning feels unsafe. Not letting yourself get excited about something because you've been hurt before. Not cutting out pictures for a vision board because you've learned that wanting things is a risk you're not willing to take.

If any of that sounds familiar — I want you to know it's not a character flaw. It's not weakness. It's what grief does when it goes unaddressed. It teaches you lessons you never consciously agreed to learn.

The Thing No One Had Ever Said to Me

The life coach at that conference said something I had never heard before — not from my doctor, not from the therapist I'd worked with, not from anyone who loved me.

She said I was allowed to want things.

She said it was okay to sit in my grief, to honor it, to carry it close. But that I could not let it run my whole life.

I know that sounds simple. Maybe even obvious, when you read it here. But those words landed somewhere in me that had been closed off for years. I felt a physical exhale. Something shifted.

And that shift led me to hire that life coach. To work with her for years. To eventually change my entire career path so I could bring that same kind of support to the moms who are sitting at their own blank pages right now.

Therapy vs. Life Coaching for Grief — Why It Matters

I want to talk about this for a moment, because I think it's important.

Therapy is valuable. It looks backward — it helps you understand your past, process what you've been through, and make some peace with it. There is absolutely a place for it, and I don't want anyone to hear me dismissing it.

But life coaching is different. It meets you exactly where you are right now and asks: where do you want to go from here? Not in spite of your grief, not instead of your baby, but bringing all of it alongside you.

It doesn't ask you to be over it. It doesn't ask you to move on or heal on anyone else's timeline. It just says — this is where you are. What do you want to do from here? And what do you need in order to get there?

That was the shift I didn't know I needed. And it changed everything.

Your Baby's Memory Can Live in Your Future Too

Here is what I want you to take away from this more than anything else.

Your baby's memory does not have to live only in the painful places.

It doesn't have to be the thing that holds you back, keeps your world small, or makes the future feel impossible. It can be woven into how you love, how you dream, how you show up every day. Into every part of a future that is still yours to build.

Twenty-six years later, my girls are still part of everything I do. They're in why I get up in the morning. They're in every conversation I have with a mom who is struggling. They're in this podcast, this community, every piece of work I put into the world.

Grief and hope can live in the same heart. I promise you that — because I know it. I've lived it.

And I want that for you too.