Good Grief

I am in mourning. I have experienced a death and I am now desperately trying to come to grips with the loss.
In reality, I experienced several losses or deaths in a row and I can hardly believe I am still standing.

If we go back a few months, we find the loss of a man I believed to be the embodiment of all the things I'd been looking for in a man. Shortly after, the loss of the baby I might have had with that man.

Finally, I am now trying to deal with the death of a dream. Actually, "the" dream. The one we, as women, have had since we could dream: husband, kids and a home.

I do take partial responsibility for the death of the dream. In order to move forward in my life, I have been advised that I must first mourn what will never be. My rabbi was the first person to advise me to do this. When I was in the throes of heartbreak over LDB, Sunny convinced me it was ok to treat this like a death and to fully mourn it by going through the five stages of grief. It felt so self-indulgent at first but soon I gave in to the Anger and Depression. I felt as though I'd already went through the Denial and Bargaining at the tail end of the relationship. And yes, I finally reached Acceptance.

This process started all over again when I miscarried.

Much to my dismay, when I joined the Single Mothers by Choice group, I found out the first thing we are supposed to do is grieve the death of "the" dream. That is the first step to becoming ok with having a child on your own. You must get in the mindset that you would have preferred to do it as a part of a couple, but that is just not an option. They say that if you mourn the loss of the dream, you will come to accept the circumstances in which you are having a baby.

Unfortunately, I believe someone forgot the sixth stage of grief: the backslide. For every day I think I've accepted that I am single and that I can have a baby on my own, I have a day or two of crying over my loneliness or feel the sheer panic over trying to raise a child alone.

The honest truth: I don't know where to go from here and I am scared to death.