In the Middle of Fresh Grief

Four months ago, I gave birth to a baby who did not cry.

There are sentences that split your life into a before and an after. That is one of mine.

Before this, there were two other goodbyes. Two pregnancies that ended in miscarriage. Two small beginnings that flickered out before I could fully hold them. Each loss carved something out of me. Each one changed the way I carried hope – more cautiously, more protectively, as if guarding a fragile flame from the wind.

And then came the stillbirth. The kind of loss that rearranges your atoms. The kind that makes the world look offensively normal the next morning. The sun rises. Emails arrive. People post about dinner and birthdays and good times. Meanwhile, your body aches with milk it cannot give, and your arms ache with absence.

Fresh grief is disorienting. It’s brushing your teeth while replaying the entire hospital stay in your mind. It’s standing in the grocery store, staring at shelves, because you can’t remember what you came for. It’s answering, “I’m okay,” because the real answer would unravel the room. It’s discovering that the world does not stop when yours does.

I am learning that grief is not only sorrow. It is love with nowhere to land. It is memory and longing and a thousand invisible moments that no one else sees. It lives in ordinary Tuesdays. It shows up in the quiet. It hums beneath conversations about weather and work and weekend plans. And yet, life continues.

This is the part no one quite prepares you for. The surreal responsibility of continuing to live while your heart feels shattered. Paying bills. Folding laundry. Making plans. Smiling when appropriate. Existing in a body that has known birth and death in the same breath.

I have been thinking of this season as “the tender middle.”

The tender middle is the space between who you were and who you are becoming.

It is not the sharpest edge of shock anymore, but it is not resolution either. It is the in-between. The soft, bruised, uncertain place where the old version of you no longer fits, and the new version has not fully formed. In the tender middle, you are both fragile and strong. You are learning how to carry grief without it carrying you away. You are learning that joy and sorrow can sit at the same table. You are learning that healing is not linear and that love does not end with a heartbeat.

I am writing here because I need somewhere to put this love. Somewhere to tell the truth about what fresh grief feels like. Not polished. Not inspirational. Just real.

If you are here because you, too, are living in some version of the tender middle, whether it be after loss, after change, after the life you expected unraveled – I hope you find language for what feels unspeakable. I hope you feel less alone.

This space will hold the raw and the holy. The anger and the gratitude. The questions without answers. The small, stubborn flickers of hope.

Four months ago, I became a mother to a child I cannot raise. That reality will always be part of me. So is this becoming.

Welcome to the tender middle.