Part III--The Aftermath

This is the part three of a longer story. I suggest you go back two days and catch up before reading this one if you haven't already. Also, I'd really like to include some pictures for everyone, but apparently some of blogger's recent problems have affected the picture uploads. Has anybody else had the same problem? I may try again later to add pictures to this post and yesterday's, so you might want to check back just to look at the pictures.

Yesterday I talked about Patrick's journey through the NICU, but mentioned very little of my own. It appears as though, I too had to go through a journey both before and after he came home. If you remember, I noted yesterday that I felt incredibly numb just after Patrick was born. Really that feeling lasted for several days. I look back now and realize the severity of my detachment. I understood in my mind exactly what I should be feeling and forced myself to act as though I felt that way. I doubt now my act fooled anyone, but I still gave it my best shot. I squeezed out a few tears when I saw him in the NICU and when I had to leave him at the hospital, but there was very little emotion behind those tears.

Even after getting home, I didn't feel much. I was very distracted for about a week with having my parents visiting and Matt home from work and then moving the next weekend. It wasn't until we were settled in our new house that everything began to sink in. Suddenly I was left all alone as company went home and Matt went back to work, and we didn't have any cable or Internet to distract me. All I had was box after box to unpack. That left me way too much time with my thoughts. I started having frequent episodes of the baby blues, as I'd heard them called. They weren't fun, but as long as that's all they were, I knew I could cope with them.

The longer Patrick was in the hospital, though, the worse the episodes got, and more frequent. I spent most days sleeping until noon when Matt would come home for lunch and physically drag me out of bed. I moped around during the afternoons until it got close to time to go to the hospital. Then I would start perking up and getting excited, although a bit anxious too. I had hope that things would go well at the hospital. Much of my emotions for the night and next morning had to do with what happened at the hospital. If Patrick had done well and had his feedings upped, and especially if we got to give him a bottle or change his diaper, I was in great spirits, elated even, sometimes into the next morning. If he hadn't progressed and we only got to hold him a few minutes and he slept the whole time, I would get depressed again. I can remember crying on the long drive home numerous times because things didn't go as well as I'd hoped at the hospital. It was during this time that Matt and I began to suspect I was a victim of post-partum depression. I was too embarrassed about it to ask for help, though, so I suffered (and made Matt suffer) alone.

I was sure everything would be better when Patrick came home. And it was somewhat better. The depression started hitting me less often, but it didn't go away completely. I thought it was the lack of sleep and assumed once Patrick slept through the night, I would be better. I wasn't. By the time Patrick was six months old, Matt and I were stunned that I was in such a statistically impossible minority to still be suffering from post-partum depression. That's when I began to search for another possible cause of the depression.

In the last few weeks I have started realizing that it probably isn't depression in the traditional sense, but really more related to grief. I'd never thought of grief as the cause because Patrick hadn't died. Yet I still believe that parents of preemies grieve for their little ones. We grieve that our babies are sick and we're helpless to fix things. We grieve that we didn't get to experience the last few months of pregnancy or our perfect deliveries. We grieve that we can't even care for our own babies, and the first parents they know are the string of nurses and doctors who change their diapers and feed them. We grieve when we go out in public and see other new parents with their babies and feel jealous that we're parents too and nobody knows it. We grieve that our preemies have the very real possibility of not making it or having long-term complications, even when they're healthy all along. We grieve that our bodies failed us and our babies. We grieve that we can't even hold our own children without express permission from a doctor.

I wish I could say that recognizing I'm grieving has made everything better, but it hasn't. I understand why I still get depressed some days, but that doesn't prevent the depressed days from coming. I know that I'm still working through those stages of grief, and until I've reached that acceptance stage, the depression won't just disappear. I think that's part of the reason I continue to try to figure this whole thing out and work through my feelings about it. I'm hoping that by analyzing it from every angle, I will suddenly find acceptance about his prematurity. I know it doesn't really work that way, but ignoring it isn't going to help me work through my feelings either. Because of that, I can't promise like I have in the past that this will be my last post about Patrick's prematurity. The blog is a good outlet for me to work through my feelings, and maybe some of my insight will also somehow help some of you other preemie moms who are going through the same thing. Maybe I will write something that you can identify with and help me through as well. So I'm sorry to those of you who are sick of hearing about this, but it's too much a part of my life right now to ignore.