Young mother with cancer. Write down your thoughts and keep what matters.
Being a mother is intense enough when you are healthy. But when you are faced with cancer or another serious illness, it becomes even more complex. You have to take care of your children while you yourself are going through an uncertain and often difficult period.
Children feel a lot, but they don't understand everything yet. Fortunately, what you are going through now, physically, emotionally and especially mentally, largely goes over their heads.
Stamps offers mothers in this situation a safe place to write about what they are going through. Not only to leave something behind, but first and foremost to process it. To understand it. To feel it. To organise it.
Why writing helps
Stamps is not a traditional ‘memories app.’ It is a warm, safe space where you, as a mother, can share your story.
Whether you are in the middle of treatment, living with metastases, or fighting every day to keep functioning, writing helps. Not to solve everything, but to reflect on what happened that day. You forget everything so quickly, and it's nice to be able to read back and see what you've already been through. Writing can also help give meaning to what you are going through.
A lot of research has been done on the positive effects of writing. Don't be put off by that word, writing. There is no right or wrong way to write.
What you can record in Stamps
- Diary entries about your day, your feelings, your fears, your hopes.
- Letters to your children, which they can read later.
- Photos of ordinary moments or of you in a hospital bed. Only later will you see what it was like and what you looked like.
- Reflections: what you have learned, what you feel, what you let go of.
Photo: Pien, co-founder of Stamps, was a young mother with cancer when she first learned she had cancer.
What you can record in Stamps
- Diary entries about your day, your feelings, your fears, your hopes.
- Letters to your children, which they can read later.
- Foto’s van gewone momenten of jij in een ziekenhuis bed. Later zie je pas hoe dat was.
- Reflections: what you have learned, what you feel, what you let go of.
Also useful for later
Although Stamps is primarily for you, it often creates something valuable for later.
Your children may be too young now to truly understand what you are going through. But someday, when they are older or have children of their own, they will be able to look back on Stamps and see who you were during this period. How you thought. How you felt. How much you loved them.
Medical terms are allowed, but certainly not required. Explanations about cancer may not be that interesting. But a tangible, personal story is. From their mother.
With Stamps, you can easily create a remembrance book.
For mothers with cancer or other serious illnesses
Stamps was developed by a mother who herself was diagnosed with cancer. At the time, her youngest child was 5 months old and her oldest was 6 years old. Stamps is now also used by women with other conditions, such as long COVID, ALS or heart failure.
The common denominator? Mothers who are going through a significant period in their lives and are looking for a way to record it, for themselves and perhaps also for their families.
Tips: how to use Stamps your way
Start without a plan, just one sentence a day
Feel free to write raw, honest, or unfiltered.
You don't have to share anything if you don't want to. Everything stays private.
Don't put pressure on yourself. This is yours.
Mothers share their experiences:
“ Thank you so much for creating the app. It has made my life so much easier, not only by allowing me to share my journey, but also by turning it into a diary, with this beautiful book as the end result. Alex
" I wish something like this had been available when I first had cancer in 2000. I have forgotten so much. It would have helped me and my children when I was going through it again.. Pien”
Your words. Your rhythm. Your story.
Stamps are not there to record your illness, but to your experience of this period. In your words, in your time.
For now, as support.
For later , as a reminder.
Would you like to try it? Download Stamps for free
