Grief 01: Where Sorrow and Motherhood Meet Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Emily Jensen: Hey, friends. Welcome back to the Risen Motherhood podcast. I'm Emily Jensen, and my co-host, Laura Wifler, will be joining me in just a few minutes. First, I wanted to let you know that today we're launching a new mini-series on the topic of grief and motherhood. This might not be the most fun or upbeat series we've ever recorded, but we know that grief is something that all moms experience at one point or another. Whether you're in the midst of a sorrow right now or you want to prepare your heart for what might lie ahead, we hope these episodes provide comfort and truth.
In the coming weeks, we're going to cover a lot of different topics, including episodes on miscarriage, infant loss, adoption, chronic pain, and more. While this series is meant to be an encouragement to you, a podcast can't speak to the specific details and struggles of your day-to-day life. So, as you're listening through, we hope you'll also consider reaching out to a trusted friend, mentor, counselor, or other medical professional that can speak to your specific circumstances. This series is not meant to give personal advice or be a substitute for professional help.
A couple more things before we dive in. You know that at Risen Motherhood, we love a good equipping resource. We're so excited to share that we've partnered with our friends at Every Moment Holy to produce a free digital download that includes eight liturgies for moms walking through grief. This download touches on topics such as grieving our own failures, the death of a dream, sharing a common loss, and more.
Our teams worked together to adapt these liturgies specifically for a mom to pray through. We really hope it's an encouragement to you. You can find all of the info for how to get your free download at risenmotherhood.com/grief. Resources like this are possible because of the generous support of our donors. To continue these free resources and producing the podcasts, we need your help. We know everyone's capacity to give is different, but if you're able, we'd love for you to consider giving $30 per month to help us continue creating more series like this one. We have a goal for a hundred new monthly partners to join us. Head to risenmotherhood.com/gift to donate today. Alright, let's dive into today's episode.
Laura Wifler: Hey, friends, Emily and I are sitting here together in the recording room, and we are back for another season of Risen Motherhood, and we are addressing the topic of grief this season. We know this is a heavier topic—this is a very big topic, but it's something that Emily and I have wanted to do for a long time. What's interesting is, while this might be the first episode that you guys are all hearing, actually Emily and I are recording it on the tail-end of having completed almost all of the episodes in the series.
Em, I was thinking about this—that I'm just really grateful that we had a chance to hear the interviews that we are about to have our audience listen to in the future months to come, because it gives us so much good perspective for this first episode as you and I talk about it together.
Emily: Yes, this wasn't our plan. We were going to record this first, and we've had a string of sick kiddos and other things that have just pushed this recording off a little bit. I'm so grateful because one of our concerns with this series is just knowing that not every episode will correspond with someone's personal experience and how heavy this topic is. Even if we can relate and we understand grief, we can sometimes avoid listening to other people talk about it because you just think, "I don't want to compound that heaviness on top of what I'm already feeling." Or maybe "I'm not going through a season of grief, but I don't really want to hear about people who are grieving."
One of the gifts that we've had as recording is just to hear some incredible, encouraging truths. We now get to share that with you on the front end—to say, listen to every one of these interviews and episodes if you can, because we have left every episode encouraged, and we've left every episode—even with the heaviness— knowing that there is a greater hope. We can't wait to talk more about that. I've just been amazed, for as worried as we were about like, "Oh man, this is going to be so hard to get through"—there have been hard moments, but I have left deeply encouraged.
Laura: Yes, absolutely. I think one of the things I was surprised by is that, in every episode, I've been brought to tears, and what someone might be sharing about one topic—let's say that's miscarriage or single motherhood—has applied to my own life. I haven't experienced those things directly, but the truths that these interviewees were sharing just spoke so straight to my soul.
That is where, like Emily said, we would just encourage you that, even if you don't feel like you resonate with one of the topics that we'll be covering, we would encourage you to listen to all of them because we know that all of you—all of our listeners—have experienced some types of griefs. And if you haven't experienced deep grief yet, that's okay; but at some point in your life, you will. These interviews may prepare you well for that day when it comes.
In this mini-series, we're excited because we're going to be talking a lot about topics that Emily and I have not had a chance to cover primarily because they are topics that we haven't personally experienced. Again, we encourage you to listen. There's miscarriage, single motherhood, chronic pain and disability, infant loss. We're going to talk about the hope of heaven. We're going to have a professional on to talk about counseling and grief and all that comes in with that. There are several different episodes that we're hoping will cover a wide variety of topics that will be encouraging to you guys, again, even if you haven't personally experienced them.
Emily: We know just from the DMs that we've received over the years and the comments that come in and post after post or just the in-person conversations that we're able to have with listeners and community members of Risen Motherhood, that a lot of you guys have experienced loss in motherhood, and you're trying to figure out, "How do you process that? How do you keep being a mother in the midst of your pain, your struggle, all the different things?" Today, we're just going to kick off with an overview of grief and some of the ways it impacts motherhood and some of our own personal experience with it. Let's just start with the basics. What is grief?
Laura: Yes, this is a good question, but it's really just a feeling or an experience of deep sorrow or despair. It's usually caused by some kind of loss, like Emily mentioned earlier. It can be big or little. It can be something that's really life-altering, or it can even be something smaller. Something like the loss of a marriage or a dream or your health or the sense of control—loss of the life that you thought you were going to have and you're not having right now.
It can even be something like deep grief over the sin of the world or even feeling like the loss of who you are—that you aren't who you wanted to be or who you thought you would become. Grief—it feels ambiguous to explain, but most of us, when we're in it, we know what it is in general.
Emily: Yes. I know, Laura, you and I have both had different experiences of grief over the course of our motherhood. And I think it's interesting too—because we've talked about this a lot over the years—how we have different personalities, and so I think, at times, it's looked different for both of us. I've noticed that I'm more of an internal processor, and I tend to be pretty steady on the outside, but on my inside, I can have a real internal life that's going on and a whole thought life and process. I can feel deep sorrow or despair, or I notice things in my physical body or in different patterns of the way I'm communicating. Then it's like, "Oh, that's grief."
Probably for me, when that most came to the surface was really through the season of diagnosis for our son with disabilities. That's hit with various waves at different points in life—often unexpectedly, where I'll have a moment where I'll realize like, "Oh, this is what he would have been doing at this stage, or this is what our family might have been able to do if he would have been typically developing."
There's even been—I'll use the word "traumatic"—moments with him, with certain health things that have really been impactful for me and have caused me to grieve in really deep ways. I think that it's just been interesting because I've noticed how it does affect my mothering of all of my children when I am grieving. Even if I'm not crying, there are things about me that are different through that process. I've really had to apply truths and be patient to know that "Oh, I want this to be over right now, and I want to be back to my happy self."
Like recently—we were on a vacation with our family, and we had something happen that brought on a huge wave of grief and emotion, and I spent half the trip just feeling bad that I wasn't fully enjoying the moment that we were in. I couldn't because I was also grieving. It's like this internal wrestling and frustration, and something as "simple" as being on a trip with your kids and saying, "I want to enjoy this moment at the beach"—but then deep down, I just feel numb or sad or—I don't know. It's hard. It's hard, and it can bring on a lot of guilt. We want to talk through that, but, Laura, what does grief look like for you?
Laura: I was really resonating where you were talking about, at the end, feeling distant from your family, especially as a mom.
Emily: Yes, like a shell of yourself almost.
Laura: Totally. I think that that does happen a lot in motherhood. I didn't experience that type of feeling probably until I had children and I had a husband and I felt like, hey, I don't know if the word is—but when I'm with those people, I want to give them all of me, and I want to be fully present but knowing that I'm grieving. And maybe my children don't understand, so, therefore, they're not grieving the same way I am. Then my husband is handling things in a different way. I can feel alone and isolated, and I can feel like I'm checked out. Or it's this out-of-body experience where you're feeling like all this stuff is going on around me, and yet I can do nothing but ruminate here on the pain that I'm experiencing.
I know I wear my heart on my sleeve. I'm definitely more emotional than Emily on the outside. I know that for me, grief definitely is very visible when people are around me, even if I perhaps sometimes don't want it to be like that. I do feel like grief—just any emotion bleeds out of me, and I definitely have felt like I become more angry easily or impatient. I can feel like I have just a lower tolerance to see the good things in life and to be joyful in life. I feel like it really affects my attitude. That was something that I didn't really realize.
For a while, I was like, "I'm just an angry person," or "Lord, help me with a sin of anger," or whatever. Then realizing that like, no—that's just my grief bleeding over. And it doesn't make it right—it's still wrong—but also, the problem was deeper than my anger. The problem was that I was deeply grieving hard things in my life and had to process. Sometimes I needed time, but other times, I probably needed to deal in a healthier way with my grief.
Instead, I was just bulldozing through life as if nothing had changed. I do tend to power through, pull up your bootstraps—that's the mentality that I can have. I feel like grief is very hard for me to contain, and it does just spill out of me—not always in ways that look like obvious grief, but that's what's underneath them. It definitely affects my motherhood. I am disappointed in myself at times as a mom when I'm grieving. That only compounds the grief, it seems like.
Emily: I hear you. I think I wrote about this one time, but I was riding my bike one day. We live in Iowa with the cornfields—
Laura: Flat, windy paths.
Emily: There are no trees to stop the wind. I was headed north on my bike, directly into a headwind, and it was about the same miles per hour as I typically ride. Basically, if I pedaled my normal speed and the wind is coming at me, I don't move. Does that make any sense?
Laura: Just still going backwards.
Emily: I realized that I was having to put double the amount of effort in to go—mathematicians, don't message us—but to go half the amount of distance or whatever. I just thought that that to me is what it feels like to go through motherhood with grief. To just unload the dishwasher or make dinner or respond to a child with kindness—it takes double the amount of effort because you have this weight pressing against you.
On the outside, you may still be going through these motions, but it's taking so much out of you to just do these basic things. Recently, I was watching a TV show that Laura likes too—that we were talking about before this—but in one of the episodes, the mom is really sad. Something really terrible has happened to her, and she has a very rich, privileged life. She's got people who take care of her children, and she just closed her curtains and just crawled into bed.
It was interesting because I had this thought of like, "Most moms can't just crawl back into bed." We have something horrific happen to us, and your kid comes and tugs on your shirt and is like, "Mom, I'm hungry. I'm hungry. I want a snack, I want a snack, I want a snack." You're like, "I just had this really incredibly hard news or this incredibly painful thing happen," and you just want to crawl in bed, and people still need you.
Now, we are not in any way saying—we're going to talk through this throughout the series—that you should just go, go, go and continue doing that and never take a moment to be by yourself, but I think that that, at least to some degree, helps us understand that feeling of like—motherhood goes on even when you're grieving, and we've got to figure out how to apply the gospel and walk through that well.
Laura: One of the things, before we get too far, that we want to note is just this idea of comparison and grief. As we talk through some of these different things throughout this mini-series, we're certainly not going to cover all the topics that one could cover. That would be a series that probably would never end, and we also want to recognize how easy it is to start to compare grief—thinking that someone's grief is less than ours, and our grief is deeper, and we have more reason to grieve.
I know just even this idea that there might be some levels of grief. I think we would all agree that a mom who doesn't get the promotion she wants and is grieving about that—that is probably a lesser grief than someone who lost their child. That's objectively true, but at the end of the day, the reality is—even two moms who have lost their child, who intimately know that horrific pain—still, their losses are different. There are no two losses that are actually the same, and each stands alone and unique in the suffering that it brings.
If we are to say that someone's loss is less-than—we are actually somewhat invalidating how bad what happened to them was. For those who think that they have suffered more or worse than anyone else, then they are falling into the trap of thinking that, "Oh, no one else can understand me. I alone have it the worst. I cannot be helped by anyone." Both of those things are really dangerous extremes.
We just want to encourage you, as we dig into some specific circumstances that cause grief—there isn't necessarily any worth or value in going through and saying, "My grief is even worse than hers. I can't learn from them," or "My grief is different than theirs. I can't be helped by this person." We're hopeful that every mom who comes to this mini-series and is experiencing grief—even among your own personal friends—that you're able to say that we can learn from one another in these griefs. Because, like we opened the show with—we were brought to tears by some of these interviews while we were discussing griefs that we had never even experienced.
The gospel is greater, and the gospel can help us and meet us exactly where we're at.
Emily: We want to take a minute to zone in on some unifying griefs that we all experience, because any mom listening who is a follower of Christ has felt the grief of her own sin in light of a holy God. If we follow Christ, that means we've had a moment in our lives where we have despaired of our own efforts and our own inability, and we have thrown ourselves at the feet of Christ to receive the gift that he gives us on the cross.
I think nearly every mom who's gone on to follow the Lord also has some level of sadness in her heart at times over the state of the world and all of the suffering and all of the injustice and the death that is out there, whether she's experienced that firsthand in her own family or not. I want to start there—that, for all of our comparison, the reality is, if we follow Christ, we have experienced that grief. We know the grief of death, we know the sting of it, and we know the horrificness of sin at some level. We all feel that sorrow, and we all long for Christ to return and for everything to be made new.
As we dive into this series, I think one thing we want to do is focus less on who has endured the greater sorrow in this life and whether or not that mom's sorrow is valid or not and more on the God who hears and who sees and who shows mercy and compassion and steadfast love in the midst of that sorrow—and then to really apply the truth and the hope that we have. I think that there's one episode at the very end of this series—you guys are going to hear—we're going to end on the hope of heaven. I just was so, so encouraged by that and by those truths—just to be brought back to who God is and what we ultimately have to look forward to. As Christian moms, we can be unified around that.
Laura: Em, I appreciate you talking about the fall and how we have all experienced loss because of that—asking that question of like, "Why do we grieve, or where does grief come from?" Like we're saying, it's from the fall. Adam and Eve disobeyed God; they were in the garden living in union with God, and they disobeyed him. Now there is a loss. There is sin that had entered the world, and Adam and Eve were forced to leave Eden to head east. Death became a part of this world. We know from Genesis 3 that motherhood specifically has increased pain. Some commentators even say that the word "bear" in verse 16 talks about the hardships and pains and troubles of motherhood—not just what we experience in labor, because we all know the pain of that, but also just in all of motherhood—that the cost of raising children is very high.
We know now that motherhood, from a womb-to-tomb kind of thing—that is going to all include grief. And not just the day of the child's birth but all the way through. That is, I think, helpful to understand—that this is the reality of what we live in. There is an explanation for how we live. It doesn't necessarily make it any easier, but there is an explanation for why we experience grief on this side of Eden.
Emily: I think that it's interesting because, as that story goes on in Genesis, we get the narrative illustration of the pain of bringing forth children because Adam and Eve go on to have Cain and Abel, and one of their—I'm just always shocked by this—that the next story after Eden is one where their younger son brutally murders his older brother. It's interesting; they have Abel, and likely, they thought he was this promised seed, but sin and death were already so interwoven into their family and into humanity. Can you imagine?
Laura: No, no.
Emily: Not only you lost a child—it was because your other child killed them. And this was after Eden—for Adam and Eve who had been in Eden with God. How shocking. It just shows us right there—this is what family looks like now. This is what bringing up children looks like now. We don't experience that literally, but that should tell us something about what to expect in this story. There really is a sorrow in that, and I think that's why, when we get to the bookend of the Bible, we see God saying in Revelation 21:4 that he's going to wipe away every tear—because of all of the grief that we're going to experience in this life. Jesus assures us we're going to face trouble and trials and tribulations, which is going to include grief.
It's interesting because it's all there, and it all makes sense, and at the very end, it's going to be resolved, and all of those tears are going to be gone. We're not to the end point yet.
Laura: Yes. Such good stuff, Em. We want to also talk today—we're going to unpack grief so much more over the mini-series, but we want to start with just sharing three truths about grief that we're hopeful will be helpful to you. They are three truths that have really comforted Emily and I in some of our sorrows. The first thing is to say that it is okay to grieve and that it is not wrong to feel sorrow and sadness and to be upset that things are not the way they're supposed to be. In Isaiah 53, it says that Jesus was prophesied and described as a "man of sorrow." He was "acquainted with grief."
When he was on earth, he wept. Why? Because he was sorrowful. He cried when Lazarus died. That story always just really strikes me, Emily—just this idea that Christ was so angry over the reality of death. He was going to raise Lazarus—he knew he was going to do that—but yet, the reality of death broke Christ so much that he wept over this reality, that this happened to his friend. That is so touching to me as a Christ follower—that even though Jesus knew he would heal Lazarus, he still said, "I am so sad that this is a reality for my people whom I love."
Emily: What I love about that story is that it shows us that not only is that response not wrong, but it's actually the right response to sin and death. Jesus responded to every situation perfectly. The most perfect thing he could have done in that situation was weep. That gives us all the permission in the world to know that, when our heart breaks because we see death and suffering and things not being the way God designed them to be, we can be sad, and that's okay. That's actually our heart longing for and affirming who God is in his goodness and, at the same time, being sad at what the world is.
We even see in Genesis 6:6 that God is grieved. It says God was grieved by the utter sinfulness of mankind. In Ephesians 4:29-32, we see that we can grieve the Holy Spirit by our sinful actions. We have an example of Jesus grieving, God the Father grieving, and the Holy Spirit grieving. It means that the Godhead even, at some point in some way, has sorrow over this. Again, we can have that same response and reaction. It's okay to cry. It's okay to feel down. It's okay to need space to process and to cry out to God in our hurt.
Laura: Those things are signs that your soul is healthy. Can you imagine if we were just stone cold in the face of death and hard things—that we didn't weep or we didn't show emotion or we didn't say, "This is not okay"? I don't know if you've ever been comforted—it's kind of a toddler coming up in like—you're crying, and then they're like, "Mom, I need food. Mom, I need water." You're like, "Hang on a second. Everything in this world has imploded."
It's good for us to say, "I feel this. I'm going to express this," and to allow the fact that these things are hard to be true all throughout our body, soul, mind, and spirit instead of stuffing it down and saying, "I have no response to this. This is not true or real or doesn't deserve my tears."
Another truth is: God is with us when we grieve. I know in some of my deepest griefs, that's when I have actually felt most distant from God. I feel like I hear tell of these people who say, "I'm so close to God in this, and I can feel him deeply." I know we all experience grief in different ways. For me, I would say that that is sometimes when I feel most far away from him. Pain can seem to conceal God from us. Oftentimes people will report that these are big seasons where people will experience doubts, sometimes, for the very first time in their lives. They might doubt God's promises, his goodness, or even his very existence.
I know grief can make many of us ask a lot of those existential questions—very basic, rudimentary questions about who we are: “Who is God? What is he up to? Is he good? What do I believe about him?" We've talked a little bit about doubt on the show before, but there's that element of doubt being an okay thing. Doubt is not necessarily something that we need to eradicate from our faith; instead, see it as a part of an element of our faith.
It is really a natural process in our grief. We know from Scripture that God never does leave us, no matter how far away he may feel. He is always with us. Scripture tells us that God's heart is inclined and near to the brokenhearted.
Emily: Yes. A third truth is that God uses our grief for good, for his good plans and purposes. I think this can be a really hard one for us to think through, but Scripture tells us that it is a tool for our sanctification, and it can actually help strengthen our faith. I know that one of the songs I really loved that helped me endure some really hard seasons of grief is the song, How Firm a Foundation. I'm pretty sure I used to sing these verses out of order, but it didn't matter because the truth was still good: "When through the deep waters, I cause thee to go, the rivers of sorrow shall not overflow for I will be with thee by troubles to bless and sanctify to thee thy deepest distress."
This is a good part: "When through fiery trials, thy pathway shall lie, my grace, all-sufficient shall be thy supply. The flame shall not hurt thee. I only design thy dross to consume and the gold to refine."
What I love is that that is a picture of someone going through trouble and trial but not being fully consumed. The waters—they're going to come up, but they're not going to overflow. You’re not going to drown in it. Fiery trials. You're going to go through fire, but the only thing that's going to burn away is the dross. The thing that's going to stand is only going to become more refined and more beautiful.
That's just so encouraging to me. We are only seeing one part of the story that God is writing. It's often not until years later—or maybe not even in our lifetime—that we will see and know all of what God was doing in his greater, grander way.
Recently, I was reminded of this story of William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English at a time when that was not allowed. It was outlawed to translate the Bible into English so that "normal people" could read it and understand it, and he was actually executed for that.
He died, and his last prayer as he was being executed was, "Lord, open the king of England's eyes." William Tyndale dies, but what's amazing is that, three years later, in 1539, King Henry the Eighth, I think, ended up requiring every parish in the Church of England to make a copy of the English Bible available to its parishioners. William Tyndale did not live to see that that prayer was answered. He went through tremendous suffering, grief, persecution to do this work that God had for him to do, and he died before he saw what God did with that.
God answered his prayer, and we can now look back and see that narrative and see, "Oh, that was so worth it, and God was doing something in the midst of that," but we can't have that perspective on our own pain and our own suffering so many times. I think it can be helpful to read the stories of other saints to remember, "That's going on in my story too, even though I don't know the details and how this is going to fit into the greater story."
Laura: Another way God uses it for our good is—it allows us to understand and comfort others in their own sorrows because we've been through it ourselves. Over the summer, there was a shooting at my church, and one of the books my pastor recommended that we all read was A Grace Disguised. In that book, he talks about how our souls expand in grief—how our souls are more like a balloon; they're elastic, and they grow larger in suffering. And after I read that, I actually started hearing people talking about it all over the place, and it was one of those things where I'm like "Oh, this is feels like a new concept to me, but everybody apparently knows this but me."
The thing with grief is that often we are experiencing more anxiety, more depression, more worry, more darkness, but because we have come to know that darkness so well, we also now have the capacity to experience light even more—the peace, the joy, the love, the kindness.
That is really incredible because I saw that pattern in my own life. As I think through the griefs that I've had and the seasons of suffering, and as I've come out of them, I’ve seen that I have become a softer, kinder, more compassionate person because I've experienced loss in both big and little things.
I think of my own daughter's disabilities, and I am a way more understanding parent to other parents. I just recognize more that, hey, parenting is really hard, and you don't really know what's going on behind the scenes. There might be a lot of invisible things, or there might be really hard griefs and that is one of the reasons why that mom burst out in anger at the store or whatever.
It has made me much more compassionate to other mothers and parents. Or because I've experienced the critique of the internet as a woman in leadership, I am a lot more compassionate towards those who are in leadership, whether that's online or offline. Just to understand that, hey, there are a lot of things pulling for that leader's attention, and there are a lot of invisible reasons to the public eye of why someone might make a decision. We can't know what we would do in that situation. I've been really grateful for that because, as I've experienced my own losses, I feel like the Lord has made me a much more peaceful person. And because I've known some of the deep darkness of things, I'm also much more willing to offer light in those dark spaces, and I'm able to do so because I've been through it myself. I think there is real beauty there of the sanctification that occurs through sorrow and grief, and that is definitely a way that God uses it for our good.
Emily: As we move throughout this series which, again, we really hope that you'll join us for—one of the things that you're going to hear people come back to again and again is just the joy and the peace and the rest that we can have in Christ regardless of our circumstances or our situation.
Again, that's not to negate the feelings that we have, but we do have hope as Christian moms. We are still going to struggle; we're still going to suffer. It doesn't make things perfect overnight. One of my kids recently was asking me in the car—I was really surprised by this question: "Mom, what is one of the hardest things you've ever been through in your life?" I said, "Actually, I think it was a couple of years before I became a Christian." I said, "I don't know that those are the hardest things that have ever happened to me, but I remember going through hard things and not having the hope of knowing my security was in Christ."
I said, "It was really, really, really depressing to struggle and to make unwise choices and to just not know any assurance, any security. I felt like my whole identity could just get burned down in a minute and have nothing beyond myself—so dark." I was sharing with him that, "I've hard times since then, but I've always had Christ. I've always had God, and I've always known that deep down and eventually, everything would be made right, and there really a comfort in that." It's not a platitude; it's a true piece of hope that we can hold onto.
