Sage House Glass

Tag: grief

  • Life Updates: Art as Therapy

    Life Updates: Art as Therapy

    TW: child loss, infertility

    When I started my little stained glass business, I didn’t imagine I’d be leaving my day job anytime soon. Don’t panic– I’m still not. I love being a librarian by day (with some night shifts and weekends) and I wouldn’t want to abandon all this progress in my career. After ten years in the field, I’m in leadership and staff development. I work with a creative group of very unique people I truly consider family. I get to cultivate community and facilitate story times and programs for children, what could be better than that?

    At least, that’s what I thought before we lost our son. It’s harder these days to work with children–don’t get me wrong, I still love it, but every cooing baby and excited toddler reminds me of the struggles we’re facing in our fertility “journey.”

    After another difficult year of hoping for results naturally, we finally decided to try IVF, something I initially balked at in fear. Injections? Hormones? A thousand blood draws and doctor visits? How could we afford the time, let alone the expense, for IVF? But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and I was determined to be a mom.

    We started IVF in late fall 2025. Months of poking, prodding, needles, appointments, and a non-stop rollercoaster of emotions. Along the way, I’d lost the energy to create anything at all. Stained glass took a back seat, along with almost everything else. The effort was all worth it, though–we have one healthy egg! One perfect little embryo ready for transfer. One chance, really…but at least it’s a chance.

    Making art started as a way to cope with grief and loss, but it has become a persistent metaphor for what I’m going through with IVF. All of these disparate pieces of my life are going to come together like a stained glass panel; all these harsh and broken edges will form some sort of picture, eventually. We will put ourselves back together and draw some light back into our home.

    I’m officially slowing down and smelling the roses until this transfer happens. I’m taking my sweet time when I’m designing and creating new stained glass pieces. I’m making less art, but better art. I’m enjoying what it feels like to really breathe alongside what I’m making, back to the origins of meditative creation. Because all of this? All of this is therapy. It’s all a part of the bigger picture that I’m hoping is being soldered together right now as I type this.

    • The roses in my backyard I’m sitting with this spring

  • The Mother conundrum

    The Mother conundrum

    TW: child loss.

    As I become more comfortable flexing into my grief and stretching out into this space, I want to share all the ways that my art is informed by my loss. Certainly, art is healing. Art is a companion in grief. Creating glass art has been a balm to my anxiety. But art can’t protect us from the endless onslaught of holidays.

    Here is the heart of it all: I am a mother, but I am not a mother.

    There are a lot of ways I’m technically a mother. I was pregnant, I carried my baby for six months. My husband and I announced him, celebrated him, planned for his future, until a routine scan discovered anomalies. After weeks of testing, the doctors told us the birth defects were not compatible with life. There wasn’t much we could do besides say goodbye. So our parenting journey ended in termination for medical reasons, a term I’ve grown to understand means I’m part of a very sad club of mourning parents dealing with complicated grief.

    Am I a mother? I gave birth, in a way. We planted a tree in honor of my son and we’ve watched the tree grow while he’s been gone, just over a year now. He is present in our story, if not in our daily lives. We yearn for another chance at parenthood. But does that make me a mother?

    A lot of platitudes on the internet would testify that I am a mother. Friends who’ve experienced loss, they tell me I am a mother. Well-meaning family members wish me a Happy Mother’s Day, because I’ll always be a mother to a heavenly baby, an angel baby. People tell me I’m a mother– if I feel like I’m a mother.

    But I don’t feel like a mother. I’ve just begun my second year of grief and I’m discovering how much worse year two is from year one. The shock has worn off and now the emptiness in my arms is heavy, sinking me down into myself. Every “Happy Mother’s Day” message stirs a new emotion, but they’re all negative: annoyance, anger, bitterness, hostility, tears. I can know intellectually that they all mean well, they’re my support team, but that doesn’t mean my emotions correlate.

    I don’t feel like a mother. I desperately want to feel like a mother, someday.

    I booked a weekend trip away with my husband, knowing this Mother’s Day weekend would be tough. We went to the mountains and toured in Blowing Rock, NC. Our view from the AirBnb was of Grandfather Mountain, the most serene expanse of rolling green. We visited The Martin House, my favorite art gallery. I coincidentally came across an oil landscape by Christine Code, a Canadian painter living in the Midwest, called Cracking Light. The pale sliver of sunlight peaking out from underneath the heavy lavender-grey clouds struck a chord with me, and I burst like a dam in the middle of the gallery. It felt good to release some of the emotion that stays trapped in my chest.

    I think the whole point of writing about the intersection of my grief process and my art process is to let out some of this trapped emotion. If it helps even one person to give themselves grace, or to seek opportunities to create as a form of healing, I’ll feel like I’ve done something supportive with all this emotion.