Welcome

Welcome to my website "AngelsPlaza". My name is Mirjan and I have made this website because I am convinced that there should be more help for people who, like myself, remain childless, even after treatment. For the last 17 years of my life I have known that I can't have children and I'll tell you about my experience.

I've been a volunteer for a patients' association for approximately two years. There I organised talk afternoons and telephone helplines and I've been hostess for a mailing list on Premature Menopause - Premature Ovarian Failure (POF). I've talked to many women suffering from this and I understand better than many the enormous pain these women go through. For them, and because I myself have felt the hurt, helplessness and misunderstanding, I have made this website. I want there to be something "the day after", because during my time as a volunteer I have seen so much sadness after the curtain falls, after all hope has gone, there's no more treatment available and your dearest wish can't come true. I would like to give support with this site. I've asked myself how best to do this. How can I help people who have suffered such a loss? How can I be a little light at the end of the tunnel for them who carry such a heavy burden? That's when I got the idea for a website. I went through my own experience and came up with the following:
You can deal with your sadness in two ways. You can run away from it, like I have done for years, or you can confront it and do something about it and I know that won't be easy.
I've partly dealt with my grief by writing a poem "My Little Angel". It came out of the blue one evening and it helped me to write it down. You can read the poem (Sorry, it is written in Dutch but maybe you like to listen to the song) on this website, where you can also listen to the fantastic song "My Sweet Little Angel". How this number came into being you can read here on "Angels' Plaza" (translation will come soon). Later I've tried to express my feelings in other poems. My idea about this page is that it will give people a chance to do something with their feelings/sadness. You may do that on this site, just leave a note in "Inspiration Book" or talk about it with others on the forum. I would like this to become a "Plaza" where people who are childless can meet and share their grief with others. My idea behind this is that by expressing your feelings in words you give it a name so that you can come to terms with it, like I did with "My Little Angel". In my poem I named her Don-de-Dieu (Present From God), and my pet name for her is Dionne. I hope that this will make your invisible grief more bearable because you have given it a name and so it will become part of your life. It helped me a lot. You don't have to hide it anymore or act as if it doesn't exist. Parents who lost a child have somewhere to go to dwell on their loss. I'd like to know what you think of my idea and look forward to your reactions and/or inspirations.

I hope that with "Angels' Plaza" I give many people a shoulder to lean on and perhaps help to make this problem more visible and recognisable and less of a "taboo".