In honor of National Infant Loss Awareness Month
My mother-in-law (who lives far away) recently sent me pictures from hosting a tea party. Flipping through the pretty photos, I couldn’t understand why my chest felt tight.
It was a tea party for the women and girls in the family—daughters, daughters-in-law, granddaughters, nieces, cousins. Mothers sitting beside their daughters. Little girls dressed up for tea.
Then I realized – I would have gone alone.
I have two wonderful boys here on earth. Two little gentlemen whom I adore more than words can say. But all of my daughters are in heaven.
And suddenly I had this almost childish urge to explain myself to everyone in those pictures:
“I have daughters too.
They’re just with Jesus.”
Grief is strange that way.
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You’d think after enough years, you would know where grief lives. You would know which days will hurt and which memories will sting.
But grief doesn’t stay neatly tucked away beside the date when you lost your baby (babies). Sometimes it shows up at a tea party, or Christmas, or an ordinary Tuesday. Losing a baby isn’t only grieving the baby you lost… sometimes it’s grieving the life you would have lived with them.
The Christmas dresses. The family pictures. The empty bedrooms. The birthdays. Walking through the girls’ section of a store. And apparently, sometimes, a mother-daughter tea party.
These are secondary losses that nobody warns you about. Years later, you can be happily going about your life when suddenly you stumble across one.
And it feels like lemon juice on a paper cut.
—————
Maybe the particular season of life we’re in has left that place in my heart a little more exposed. My youngest isn’t really a baby anymore. Our wait to adopt Ruthie has stretched much longer than I ever imagined it would. I’m still grappling with the reality that having another biological child isn’t something we can simply decide to pursue.
Those are all different griefs. They can’t be lumped together, because having more children could never replace the ones we lost.… sometimes it just seems like too much grief and I don’t know where to put it anymore.
It exists between much gratitude. We have our boys, and they aren’t somehow insufficient because part of my heart still aches for the children who aren’t sitting at our table.
But all of these things brush against the same tender place – the place in me that still longs to mother another little one. The place that notices my toddler becoming less babyish by the day. The place that wonders how much longer we’ll wait. And the place that remembers: There should have been more of them here.
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Sometimes I wonder whether I’m still allowed to be sad. Enough years have passed since some of my losses that surely grief should have packed its bags by now.
But it hasn’t.
Most days it isn’t loud. It’s simply woven into me. And every once in a while, something pulls on that thread. My heart squeezes.
Oh.
I miss my babies today.
I’m learning that I don’t need to shove the sadness away. It’s okay for it to exist alongside gratitude and love and ordinary moments.
Genuine love doesn’t have an expiration date, so I’m not sure why we expect grief to have one.
A full and joyful life doesn’t require forgetting who is missing from it.
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For Christians, I think there can sometimes be another pressure attached to grief.
We know where our hope is. I believe my babies are with Jesus. I believe they are safe. I believe God is good. I believe He has done no wrong. I believe death does not get the final word. I believe that because of Christ, goodbye is not forever. Those truths are precious to me.
But hope does not make absence painless.
“With Jesus” is an enormous comfort. It does not fully erase the pain of “not with Mama.”
I can trust God’s sovereignty and still wish I had gotten to watch my daughters and other sons grow up.
I can believe He has all things well in hand and still feel my throat tighten when I see mothers sitting beside their little girls.
I can say – They are safe; I will see them again. And in the very same breath- I really wish I could have brought my daughters to the tea party.
Those things are not enemies. That is grief with hope.
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Maybe I don’t always need somewhere to put my grief. Maybe sometimes I just need to recognize it when it arrives. To stop for a moment and say – Oh. That’s what this is. I miss them. – and let that be okay.
There will probably be more tea parties. More photographs. More milestones. More ordinary moments that unexpectedly illuminate the empty spaces.
I am quite confident that even in my old age, O will still remember the babies I didn’t get to raise.
But I hope I won’t be ashamed of the ache. Because healing doesn’t mean reaching a point where their absence means nothing.
Their lives mattered. They are part of my story. I am their mother. Forever. It’s okay to acknowledge that.
So perhaps when those moments come along and my heart wants so badly to say it, I should simply let myself say it:
I have daughters too.
They’re just with Jesus.
©️ Grace Baeten 2026
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