Grief Informed Perinatal Care

Every year there is a month we all may dread, be saddened about or is bittersweet. Maybe some are excited to celebrate their sweet babies and look forward to it. Where ever you are on that scale, there is no right or wrong. Sometimes I have ALLL the feelings- you know what I mean. One minute we are filled with love and feel blessed to know our babies are always with us and we can still celebrate them and the next minute we are finding a closet to ugly cry in.

Well this month is my daughters birthday. I look forward to the traditions we have created over the last 3 years. This year would have been her 4th birthday. I can only imagine how much joy she would have brought our family. We would have 5 children- to me that sounds crazy to say outloud. I never wanted that many kids. But after losing her, I wanted nothing more than a big family to share this life with.

I wanted to share how this month typically goes for me and share the rituals and birthday traditions we created to keep her memory alive. My sweet baby girl. Sometimes it still feels unreal.

I hope you all are healing a little each day. If you have any of your own traditions that you would like to share with me, please leave me a comment! I read them all.

You can also send an email to [email protected] or send me a message on FaceBook

Join our group here-

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100094243272420

If you want more info on what I do head to the website and check it out!

www.vallenwebb.squarespace.com

Looking forward to connecting with you!

xx Vallen

One thing that gets affected after pregnancy loss is our marriages or relationships with significant others. It's not something we think about until it happens to us and we are forced to deal with it.

What I have learned is you can either grow apart or work hard on growing together. I find grief is a powerful force to make the greatest change. Sometimes we need things to be completely broken to decide whether to let it go or use those broken pieces to completely transform and positively influence our lives.

Whatever you decide it is a process and having support and help makes all the difference in th world. I wanted to have a conversation of the realities of what grief can do after a pregnancy loss to us and the ones we love the most. I don't see many conversations about this but I find it to be absolutely crucial and important to acknowledge this aspect of pregnancy loss.

Have a great week!

xx Vallen

You can email me at [email protected]

Find me on tiktok: @vallenwebb2

Grief can be so heavy. It can also make you believe so many things that are not true by creating intrusive thoughts, that we can often put on loop in our brains. Grief can create these lies that we start to believe and I see this so often- especially in my own story. I share my story and the thoughts that my grief tried getting me to believe and how to change them. We have to be intentional in the thoughts we have and knowing when we need to shift and reverse them.

You can find hope and joy again, even amidst grief, you can find pockets of joy or happiness. Grief and happiness can coexist. You can have more than 2 conflicting feelings at one time and that's OKAY. That makes you NORMAL lol. We can normalize that and realize that we are allowed to feel anyway we need too.

Focusing on the now and being present is what saved me in my worst grief. Focusing on how I could love my girls more and help them heal as well. Spending time outside in nature and really feeling with my senses the sun, the wind, the rain, breathing the air, listening the world around me.

Grief has a way of isolating us but we can fight that, we can change that and we normalize that and build a community around us.

Hope and joy are coming my sweet friends. It just might take a little time!

xx Vallen

I'm so excited to have Katie on the show today! You will see like I did, how much love and kindness just radiates from this woman. I'm beyond blessed to have such a beautiful conversation with this mama.

Katie Joy Duke is an author, mindset coach for women, transformational speaker, and mom of 2 daughters...one living and one in spirit. She practiced social justice law for 9 years before her firstborn daughter Poppy was stillborn at full-term.

Please Join us in this candid and soulful conversation between loss moms. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

If you are interested in learning more about Katie or working with her as your coach or buying her book. I'll link below!

If you want to inquire about her coaching services email her at [email protected]

Insta: @katiejoyduke

Website: www.katiejoyduke.com

Buy her book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble: Still Breathing: My journey with love, loss, and reinvention By: Katie Joy Duke.

I've recently learned that gender disappointment actually goes really deep. It is not a surface-level issue that comes up. There are so many things including your upbringing, your experiences, social interactions, and much more that go into feeling gender disappointment.

I've gone through gender disappointment twice after my full-term loss because all I wanted was another girl since that is what was taken from me. Little did I know there was SO much more to that. In general, gender disappointment tends to land us in shame when others hear how we are feeling. And, judgment, and shame, are NOT what we need the most at this point! No thank you. Nor do you need validation for how you are feeling, but it is nice knowing others can sympathize and just be there for you. Hearing things like, you should just be happy with a living or healthy baby, or you should be grateful that you can get pregnant, and so on are just people who are uncomfortable with the conversation and want you to These things are not helpful and nor do you have to listen to them.

I highly encourage anyone who is suffering with this and can't seem to move on from it to see a licensed therapist to help you work through the deeper stuff that it's attached too.

*** I always like to note I'm not a medical doctor, I recommend things based on personal experience, education and evidence-based information.

Maternal Mental Health is actually considered a crisis these days. Which is disheartening and scary. But now we are ALL going through something even if things look close to perfect on the outside. The last few weeks have been SO challenging for me as I'm shifting internally and externally. Working on my mindset, limiting beliefs, and constant thoughts about missing my daughter and being pregnant have been almost unbearable. I felt hopeless. This is a feeling I have every now and again when I have neglected to take care of myself and my needs. As I mature, I have more self-awareness around and am able to take steps to mend the emotional damage.

So here is a raw episode of my struggles and how I'm doing. I'm on the up and up since it's been a few weeks but I'm still dealing with the internal struggles from this feeling.

Let me know how you are doing! You can email me at info.vallenwebb.com or comment on this episode! I get back to you personally and I love taking the time to get to know you all.

Vallen

Have you ever become aware of a limiting belief you didn't even know you had?!

Well I did recently and I wanted to share my experience and what I did to start to change that messaging in my head! I hope you love this episode and I hope you'll leave a comment so we can chat more about this!

Have a great week.

xx Vallen

Are you pregnant after a loss or trying to be? This episode is for you.

I've had some pretty interesting experiences after loss with providers. I know how it feels to "suck" it up and just deal with however you get a referral or just don't know how to switch or don't know who else you can choose. You don't have to stay with an OB provider if they are not meeting your needs, allow you to feel safe and seen or just make you uncomfortable.

Here are some ways to choose a provider that is right for you.

I wanted to give an intro to who I am and the story behind what I do. My heart is centered on helping moms live after loss with intention, purpose, and joy.

Here is my story about my daughter Evelyn who was born July 20th 2019, still. She died the day before at 40 weeks and 4 days. I share my story in hopes that you feel less alone and less scared about sharing your story. I've become the go-to girl in my community and friends when women lose babies and they want to know how to support them and take care of them. And it is an honor to lead these humans to help and support those who have lost their babies.

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Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/vallen89/message

As a mom do you ever feel like your confidence has somewhat slipped away from you? Like you don't know who you are or what you are doing and lack the intention it takes to build it back up? But also have no fricken idea where to start or how to build confidence?

Then this episode is for you love! You will learn about confidence and how you get it. You will learn that in every new version of yourself and every new season that comes, you have to learn new confidence!

I hope you enjoy this episode, it's been on my mind a lot lately and we will definitely break this down farther in other episodes.

Love you, mama! Have a great week.