TFMR Support
Finding the light on the other side of your darkest days
TFMR = termination for medical reasons.
when your pregnancy goes medically sideways, and you have to end it in a way you never dreamed you would,
You are not alone.
When the best you could do was let your baby go,
You deserve to be understood
The Grief is Overwhelming
Grief is just love with no place to go. So much love. So much grief.
Under the heaviness of responsibility and the darkness of loss. The internal voices are just so confusing. Mine sounded like this:
I saved my baby. I destroyed my baby.
This happened to me. I did this.
I don’t even know who I am anymore.
Honey, there is nothing you can say that I haven’t already thought. Nothing you feel that I haven’t already felt.
In 2012, 35 weeks pregnant, problems appeared in my baby’s brain.
Abandoned by my home hospital, I flew 2000 miles to land in the safe, compassionate care of the Boulder Abortion Clinic. I birthed my baby at the clinic, held by the Rocky Mountains. Less than 24 hours later, I was flying home to Massachusetts for my 30th birthday.
I felt like the only person in the whole world who had ever been through it.
But I wasn’t. And neither are you.
Good parents sometimes do this. I did this.
I’m Kate
We might have run into each other on the internet. (Kate Cee of Ending a Wanted Pregnancy, KateCSays on Reddit , @nightbloomcoaching elsewhere.)
I’ve been building connection among TFMR parents and carving out cultural space to grieve since losing Laurel in 2012.
And all those years, I’ve been learning and training to better meet the needs of TFMR parents. I noticed a few things about this grief:
Knowing your support team not only “gets it” in theory, but GETS IT from experience is necessary for TFMR parents to feel feel safe enough to heal.
My own grief responded to somatic methods far better than to more institutionally common cognitive methods.
Babyloss like ours massively impacts our relationships: to our bodies, to intimacy, to our loved ones. Yet couples therapists often don’t know grief and grief therapists often aren’t trained to do couple’s work.
For all these reasons, I trained to be a somatic love, sex, and relationship coach with specializations in life transitions (such as pregnancy and grief) and relationship work — meaning that I am certified to work both one on one and with couples regarding grief and other collateral damage in the relationship.
I know that it is possible to find peace in grief because I have found mine. It took a long time for me, for grief was my first teacher.
I’d love to guide you to your peace, too.
We can start today.
