I Don’t Need You to Understand

I am a mother, but I have no living children.

I have two daughters that I grieve for and miss every day. I always will. Their loss is the greatest sorrow of my life.

It’s challenging, at times, to live in a world that doesn’t want to recognize their lives. A world that doesn’t want to talk about the death of babies or about pregnancies that end in silence and stillness instead of the cries of life. It can be painful to live in a world where I am expected to forget about my daughters and to live as if they never existed. It’s challenging to feel as if my experience is rejected and dismissed by even the people closest to me.

The truth is, though, I don’t want you to understand my experience. I never want you to know what it is to say good-bye to your children and have to live without them in this physical world. I don’t want you to ever experience holding the still and silent body of your child. To labor through childbirth that does not end in life and joy, but instead in tears and sorrow. To long to see them, hold them, and touch them, all the while knowing you never will in this lifetime.

The experience of this grief, this loss, and this emptiness isn’t an experience I want anyone to have to know and understand.

I, and other childless mothers like me, do want to feel loved and supported. We do want for our children’s lives to be recognized and acknowledged. We do want their lives to be as valued as those babies and people who do, for however long, live and breath in this world. We do want to be recognized as a mother even when you can’t see our children.

And, no one has to understand our experience in order to do those things.

You don’t need to understand the depth of our loss or the pain of our grief in order to share love and compassion. You don’t need to understand why, even after many years, our children’s birthdays bring sadness and grief in order to offer kindness and support. You don’t have to understand our struggle to define motherhood for ourselves without our children here in order to acknowledge and recognize that we are mothers.

We all have experiences that others cannot understand. I cannot understand what it is to be an African American man, or a parent struggling to support their kids on minimum wage, or an LGBT individual longing to be legally wed to the person they love. There are a million other experiences that I have never lived and cannot truly understand. That doesn’t mean I can’t love. That doesn’t mean I can’t honor their experience as they share it with me.

I don’t have to understand those experiences in order to share love and kindness and compassion. The story, the event, or the ability to understand of any of our situations doesn’t really matter.

Love is the only thing that matters. We don’t have to understand each other’s perspective, or even agree with each other’s perspective, in order to show love and kindness toward each other.

Ask yourself: What’s more important, to understand why this person feels the way they feel or to love them? Does it really matter if I see or agree with their perspective or is the fact that they are hurting enough for me to show kindness?

Kindness and love are what is needed, not the understanding of another’s experience.

Whatever the story or circumstance behind the pain of another, we all have a choice.

Judgment or love.
Dismissal or kindness.
Rejection or compassion.

Understanding doesn’t matter.

Love matters.

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Emily Long

Emily Long is the mother of two much-loved daughters, both gone-too-soon. Several months after the death of her fiancé, their daughter Grace was born still. For many years, Emily lived with this loss in silence and isolation. It wasn’t until she experienced the death of her second daughter, Lily, that she finally sought support and created a community of people who helped her find the beauty and joy in life again. Through her own healing process, Emily became an advocate for all families grieving the loss of their children. Emily is a grief counselor in private practice and the author of the upcoming book, “Invisible Mothers.”

Emily works hard to increase education and improve care for bereaved mothers with medical professionals and other counselors. She also works with clients individually to provide support for grieving mothers and fathers. She writes and educates through her website, Emily Long: Archaeologist of the Living.