If you become a birthmom, there are many small moments of grief that may sneak up on you, things you never anticipated being an issue before you surrender your child.

I pretty much knew to expect the Big Grief (although I definitely underestimated just how big it would be) but I certainly never thought that the small pangs would add up in quite the way that they do. In some ways, these tiny pinpricks wear you down more than the regular grieving process does – because unlike the main grief, they don’t progress through logical stages, and they don’t reduce in intensity.

Here are a few such instances from my own life:

--Two months after my son’s birth, receiving a free sample of baby food in the mail. When that little item showed up in my mailbox, so soon after the loss, it was like a knife in my heart. I actually wanted to throw up, I felt so full of sadness for what might have been. And that was not the only time something like that happened – clearly, any expectant mom who gets prenatal care is automatically placed on all the marketing lists. Unfortunately, those companies don’t have any way of knowing that your baby is no longer with you…so you’ve got to steel yourself when you open your mail.

(I imagine that women who suffer miscarriages feel much the same thing, if and when they are mistakenly bombarded with new-baby literature and product samples.)

--Attending my nephews’ soccer game and hearing another mother cheering for a boy with my son’s name. I don’t know why that one hurt so bad, but it did. In fact, I can still remember everything about that moment: the temperature, the color of the sky, the way the woman’s voice rang out and hung in the air, and the shock I felt at thinking, “That could have been me. That should have been me.”

--Riding on a plane back from Moscow, with all the adoptive parents and their new babies. While I was happy for the new families, all I could think about was the other side of things. I didn’t begrudge these families their joy, but I knew there was a lot of suffering on the Russian half of the equation that had led to this point...and I felt alone in that knowledge. What's more, it brought back some truly terrible memories--not exactly the kind you want to relive at the end of a vacation.

Those are just a few examples of small moments of sadness. Next post: small moments of difficulty or annoyance.