Day 10 of being thankful

      Today I am grateful for my bereaved mom group. We are an offshoot of a larger group. There was an article in a local newspaper about a bereaved moms group.  Many bereaved moms, including me and my friend,  went to the next meeting after reading the article.  The original group had about twenty members and after the article, there were an additional thirty or so.  The group had to splinter off because it was just too large to manage. I had taken my friend Roe to the meeting,  She was a fairly new bereaved mom. I had known her years ago and contacted her when I found out she lost her son.  I decided to run a group because I didn't want Roe not to have a group to attend.  I run the group in the daytime which works better for me. We meet at a local Paneras because then no one is stuck being the hostess.  I run the meeting but I don't have to prepare the food or clean my house before or after the meetings. Occasionally  we meet at a members house when we had candle lighting ceremonies or butterfly releases.  Most people in the group lost young adult children in the last few years.  I always try to have a topic to talk about and I make sure that everyone has a chance to talk. The original six are called the Twigs because we are a branch of the original group.  I choose to keep the group on the smaller size, we have about 10 members.  I don't think we can take over too much of Paneras space.  Everyone lost their children in different ways but that doesn't matter.  We can openly talk about our deceased children in the group and about their deaths.  It seems taboo to speak about our deceased children in regular society. I think that it is because other people don't want to bring up such a painful subject but they should understand that we still love our children and we want to talk about them.  Other people talk about moving on, but there is no moving on when you bury your child, there is only a grief path and a moving forward with support.  We support each other. We can laugh about things together that we wouldn't be able to laugh about with other normal(non-bereaved parent) people/friends.

our summer butterfly release

We are trying to find a local medium that would do a group reading for a decent price. It is difficult to find someone local that has a decent reputation.