Stephanie Blamires was saved from despair by a new support group for parents struggling to plug the ‘granny gap’
Image by fancycrave1 from Pixabay
When Stephanie Blamires, now 33, broke the news of her pregnancy to her mother, Janet Solly, in June 2022, the pair already had a very clear picture of how the following months and years would pan out for them both. After all, it was something they had been dreaming of for decades.
“My mother and I had spent my whole life talking about how much I wanted children and planning what we were going to do when I had them,” recalls Stephanie, a midwife from Kippax, West Yorkshire. “We had this dream that once the baby arrived, Mum would be there all the time. She was going to be an extremely involved grandma. She was my oracle.”
Neither could have imagined that instead, in January 2023, just seven months after those two blue lines appeared on Stephanie’s pregnancy test, Janet would be diagnosed with a grade 4 glioblastoma, a terminal brain tumour that would kill her within a year.
“Those first few months had been bliss,” Stephanie remembers with a smile. “I was pregnant and Mum didn’t know about her diagnosis. I was ringing her every single day and we would talk about how, once the baby arrived, she would pop in and take him out for walks in his pram, or we’d go to cafés together. I basically planned my maternity leave around her.”
Instead, after Oscar was born in March 2023, the early months of his life were filled with Janet’s chemotherapy appointments and the devastatingly swift decline of Janet’s health. By the time he was five months old, in September 2023, his grandma had died, aged just 66. Stephanie was left struggling to mother her newborn while grieving for her own mother.
“Losing Mum massively impacted my ability to cope and to bond with both my babies,” admits Stephanie, who gave birth to a second boy, Alfie, in September 2024.
She is sure that Janet’s loss was the trigger for the intense bouts of postnatal depression she has endured, putting it down to the trauma of confronting grief at the same time as learning to parent. “I worried all the time that I wasn’t doing it right and that I didn’t know how to be a mother,” she explains.
“Even now, every milestone is bittersweet,” she continues. “It feels like all the moments that are now supposed to be joyful are clouded with sadness because they’re all things that she should be part of: Oscar’s first steps, Alfie finally taking the bottle after months of struggles.”
Stephanie fought through those first months with the support of her husband, Dave, her father, Kevin, and her mum’s sister, not realising how deeply her mother’s death was already affecting her. “I thought mother loss would make me a better mum and more maternal, wanting to give them what I’d lost,” she says. “I don’t think people understand how much it affects you when you have your own children. It threw walls up in ways I wasn’t expecting. It was only recently that I said to my husband: ‘I think I’m starting to feel like a mum now.’
“When Oscar was nine months old, I realised I’d not bonded with him. I didn’t recognise myself – as a midwife I knew how to physically look after him, but emotionally I felt like I didn’t know what to do or how to be a mum to him. I felt more like I was his babysitter or nanny, or that people would think I was looking after my nephew, that no one would believe I was his mother.”
Stephanie sought professional help and received NHS therapy, which she found helpful, but as her second pregnancy progressed, she began to worry again that she wouldn’t cope.
“I was terrified,” she admits. “Things went really downhill and started building to a very dark place. There were times when I felt like my family would be better off without me. I loved them, but it was like I couldn’t feel it. It was like my feelings were turned off. It was a protection thing – I was trying not to love them in case I lost them.”
Recommended
‘My sibling died and my parents never talked about her again’
A friend who had also lost her mother told Stephanie about The Motherless Mothers, a support network which aims to plug the “granny gap” and mitigate the void left behind by late grandmothers, who take with them the expertise learnt through their own years of nurture and caregiving.
It was the light she needed at the end of the tunnel. Stephanie joined straight away and attended an online session, where she found other women who she could open up to. “It was a really positive space for people to get some extra support and everybody spoke to each other so easily. I think you immediately bond over that experience.”
She listened to the group’s podcasts before going on as a guest herself, and has since become the organisation’s in-house midwife. “It felt like a really positive way to talk about Mum,” she says. “Just listening to the podcast made me feel so validated and so much better.”
The Motherless Mothers was conceived in June 2024 by Adina Belloli and Louise Kirby-Jones who, like Stephanie, had mothered without the support of their own mother. They had met online, in a private bereavement group, and believe their network is unique in the support and community it offers. “Motherhood and grief are both identity-altering experiences,” explains Belloli, 45, a child and adolescent psychotherapist whose own mother was killed by a drunk driver when she was just six months old. “When they intersect, whether weeks or decades apart, the impact can be profound. We’re pushing for maternal mental health support that recognises the impact of maternal absence.”
Though she doesn’t remember her own mother, Belloli always wanted to have children of her own. After marrying an Italian, Giorgio, and settling in London, she now has a daughter and a son, both teenagers, and says the experience has been deeply healing and life-changing. “Motherhood is hard for anyone, but as a motherless mother, you’re constantly aware of what you’ve missed out on and what your own children are missing out on, and this will never change.”
Stephanie has not yet reached a point where she can even look at photos of her mother, and wonders how she’ll talk to her sons about her loss, but she holds dear the few memories of when the three generations could be together.
“One of the best nights I had with Mum was early on in her treatment,” she remembers. “She wasn’t too poorly and still looked like herself. It was so quiet and I remember we had some jazz music on and Dad fell asleep in the corner while she sat with me and gave me a little bit of advice about breastfeeding. That was the only time I had a real maternal presence there with me. To a lot of other people, that would be such an insignificant moment, but I never got that opportunity again.”
For more information go to themotherlessmothers.com or find them on Instagram. The first Mother Loss Awareness Day will take place on October 23 at the Houses of Parliament