Having a baby is exciting. There’s so much new and wonderful about it, that we often push aside negative feelings, thinking they don’t belong.
While pregnant with our second, I was sad about how my relationship with our first would change when she wasn’t my only child anymore. Yet it didn’t feel like I could grieve that.
But a new baby—just like other positive things like marriage—is a change, and with every change there is the loss of something. Marriage means the loss of family and friendships as they were. Moving to interesting places means leaving familiar places you love. A new baby means the end of family dynamics as they were.
Elisabeth Elliot writes,
“Every passage is both a death and a new life. When the child is weaned there is the severing from the only source of comfort and nourishment he has known. Suddenly he is lonely. So is the mother, as she experiences the first separation from her baby who has been intimately and physically a part of her. Weaning is thus a death for both baby and mother.”
“Death is a New Beginning,” in Loneliness
Changes are hard, even the good ones. Even the happy ones are a kind of death.
It’s ok to grieve.
The Sorrows of Eve 