Why You Might Feel Grief Right Now

Malama Health · Content Pilot · Post 24 of 265

Week 40 · Prenatal

Why You Might Feel Grief Right Now

Malama Clinical Team · Week 40 · Prenatal · Post 24 of 265

Nobody talks about this part.

Everyone is excited for the baby. Everyone asks about names and nurseries and birth plans. But very few people ask how you are feeling about the person you're about to stop being.

Because here's the truth: when you become a mother, you also leave someone behind.

The woman who existed before this pregnancy — the one with a different relationship to her time, her body, her identity, her future — she is changing. Not disappearing. Not dying. But changing so profoundly that it can feel, at times, like a kind of loss.

Dr. Aurelie Athan, the Columbia University psychologist who has dedicated her career to the study of matrescence, has a word for this: anticipatory grief. It is the mourning that can happen before birth, when you sense — consciously or not — that something about who you were is ending.

THIS IS NOT A SIGN THAT YOU DON'T WANT YOUR BABY

Let's be very clear about this.

Feeling grief about the self you are leaving behind has nothing to do with how much you want your baby. It has nothing to do with your love, your readiness, or your capacity to be a good mother.

In fact, research on matrescence suggests that the moms who feel this grief most clearly are often the ones who are most aware — most reflective, most honest with themselves. This is a sign of emotional intelligence, not emotional failure.

You can be madly in love with your baby and grieve the freedom you had. You can be desperate to hold them and mourn the version of yourself that is transforming. You can be joyful and sad at the same time. Both are true. Both are allowed.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR YOUR HEALTH

Grief that goes unacknowledged doesn't go away. It gets stored. And stored grief becomes stress — the kind that quietly elevates cortisol, the kind that can disrupt your sleep, your relationships, your sense of self.

For GD moms, chronic elevated cortisol has a direct effect on blood sugar regulation. Taking care of your emotional world isn't a luxury. It is part of your health.

The antidote is not to push the grief away. It's to give it a name, a little space, a moment of acknowledgment.

AN INVITATION

Before your baby arrives, take a few minutes to do something quiet.

Write down one thing about who you are right now that you're afraid of losing. Just one. It doesn't have to be big. Maybe it's your Saturday mornings. Maybe it's how you move through the world when only you are responsible for you. Maybe it's something harder to name.

You're not saying goodbye to it forever. You're honoring it. You're acknowledging that it mattered.

That act of honoring — of saying "this was real and it was mine" — is one of the most important things you can do as you step across the threshold into motherhood.

You are allowed to grieve the life that is ending. And you are allowed to be excited for the one beginning.