Maria Price Featured on This Podcast Will Change Your Life
- Nov 10, 2021
- 1 min read
This Podcast Will Change Your Life interviewed Maria Price, author of the memoir Love You Still. Listen to Price discuss how it's okay to not be okay, the process of grief, and Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month.
How does a mother say goodbye to her baby before she can even say a proper hello?
In the memoir Love You Still, after years of infertility, when Maria Price learned she was carrying her second child, Julia, a healthy baby girl, she felt like she had moved past the pain into her miraculous happily ever after. . . until one day, without warning, at the end of a textbook pregnancy, Maria and her husband, Joe, sat staring at an ultrasound screen that was now, heartbreakingly, still.
After birthing and then burying their daughter, Maria and Joe needed to navigate their separate grief journeys without losing each other. Despite Joe’s seemingly unconditional love and endless patience, Maria still had to find a way to live in a world without her daughter through the depression, crisis of faith, and unplanned pregnancy that followed Julia’s death.
Had God failed Maria? Had she failed Him? Had she failed as a mother? Could she still parent her son, while grieving her daughter? Was there enough room in her heart for another baby? Could she survive another loss? Could she learn to live with the constant pain of Julia’s absence? Was she willing to try?
This is a path of inexplicable heartbreak, unexpected healing, and, through it all, unfailing love.
The summary captures that awful whiplash of “finally, a healthy pregnancy” turning into the unthinkable. I also appreciate the mention of how grief can collide with an unplanned pregnancy afterward — people don’t talk about that complexity enough. Weirdly, it made me think of how I try to make small controllable changes when life feels uncontrollable — even something as shallow as changing my hair after a hard season, which is why I’d ended up on https://stylelooklab.com at one point. But nothing fixes it; you just keep learning how to carry it.
What I keep thinking about is how the world expects you to keep functioning while you’re carrying something that heavy — especially when there’s already another child to parent. It’s not “closure,” it’s more like learning how to live with the missing piece. On a totally different note, I once saw a remembrance post paired with art someone made on this site, and it reminded me how many people use creativity to say what they can’t out loud.
The faith questions in the summary felt especially honest — that “Had God failed me?” spiral is something a lot of people are afraid to say out loud. I’m curious what part of the conversation went deepest on that, because it can be hard to discuss without turning it into platitudes. Randomly, I remember seeing a similar “where do I even put this pain?” question pop up while browsing this page for something totally unrelated, and it surprised me how common that language is.
That question “How does a mother say goodbye before a proper hello?” is brutal, and I’m glad she doesn’t pretend there’s a clean answer. The part about navigating separate grief journeys reminded me of how people look for any framework to make sense of chaos — even something totally unrelated like a grade curve scoring tool where you can see how one adjustment shifts everything. Grief isn’t math, but the urge to re-calculate your life is so relatable.
I appreciated that this doesn’t try to wrap grief up with a neat bow — that “depression, crisis of faith” part is real and messy. It also made me think about how people try to distract themselves after loss; I’ve definitely defaulted to mindless puzzles on this site when my brain needed a break. Hearing parents talk honestly about the strain on a marriage feels important.