Presbyterian Mission Agency acknowledge grief Archives

acknowledge grief

Hallmark holidays can hurt

Posted August 16th, 2022

Mother’s Day was always fine for me, until it wasn’t. My husband and I had been trying to have a child, and month after month stretched into year after year. Eventually, we grew to dread the annual double punch of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Our well-intentioned church tried to soften the blow on those special Sundays by giving every woman a rose on Mother’s Day and having a blowout barbecue for the all the men on Father’s Day. I still, though, found myself choking back tears and doing a lot of fake smiling. It already felt like God had grown deaf to our prayers, but not finding our experience acknowledged in our church community made it worse.