If you decide to cancel your holiday plans with your loved ones, you find yourself grieving the holidays you expected to have. Grief over your holiday plans is totally normal and understandable as grief is our normal reaction to a loss. And, this year, we’ve lost our sense of normalcy.

Family dynamics during the best of times can be complicated and stressful. Now, many women are struggling to cope with anxiety caused by family members who don’t want to practice social distancing or ignores COVID-19 guidelines. Having awkward and potentially stressful conversations about your COVID-related boundaries with your extended family may be filling you with dread. Especially now that the holidays are quickly approaching. Maybe, you’re worried that your family may get their feelings hurt or be angry when you share your plan for social distancing. Or, perhaps you’re concerned they may even try and convenience you that you’re being irrational. But, your primary goal right now is keeping your family safe and healthy.

In the last few years, there has been a greater recognition and increased discussion about what women experience during the postpartum period. Women are becoming more comfortable sharing about their own struggles with postpartum depression and how they were able to seek help.

While a dialogue has opened up about postpartum depression, there is one thing that is often missing from the discussion: postpartum anxiety.

While the unpredictability of pregnancy is universal for every woman, the reality is that military spouses face an additional level of unpredictability due to military life. Being married to a member of the military means learning how to adapt and adjust to frequent uncertainty. Deployments and field trainings can be thrown at you without much notice, which leaves scheduled plans a distant memory. And while the military’s demands frequently ruin plans, those demands also leave military spouses alone without the support of their companion during pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period.