Day 4 - Going home (without our baby)

Jack was born on a Monday and I got discharged from the hospital on Wednesday. We thankfully had a close by place to stay (Ike’s sister & fam had a new house with a finished basement we could commandeer) but it wasn’t our familiar space and the bigger heart ache: we came home without a baby. He was no longer just one floor down from us - he was a 10 minute drive away.

It was the worst. More terrible than a lot of our other really hard days.

I still felt like I’d been hit by a truck. Hormones raging, I was pumping every 2-3 hours, exhausted, didn’t know where any of our stuff was (Ike packed up our clothes & things that day at the hospital while I stayed with Jack & my Dad visited). I weeped. I think I sat on the floor and weeped actually. I am pretty sure I said “I can’t do this” to Ike too.

It was awful.

It got better - we developed a routine and some normalcy over the following weeks but that didn’t change the hardest part about it - our son wasn’t there with us.

We did have one little slice of solace - the NICU has little cameras on each isolette so you can log on to a site and watch the camera. So we could check it during the night if we woke up or before bed or when we woke up - basically all of the time we weren’t at the hospital. And our family could look at it too.

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Day 32 - How grief changed me

I obviously missed quite a few days - I took about 2 weeks off - turns out blogging about heavy stuff is draining and I probably bit off more than I could chew by aiming to do 35 posts. I have been reflecting on how grief has changed me over the last two years. In many ways, I am not the same person I was when 2021 began. Grief has changed my thought life, my friendships, my work. First - My world got tiny. I often felt myself looking inward (at my usually crappy situation) and feeling a lot of pity, sadness, anger and occasional shame. In those seasons, it’s so hard for me to be an engaged friend. Essentially grief has made me selfish. When you are going through so much stuff, you don’t have capacity to extend yourself to be there for your people. There’s nothing wrong with that - that’s the reality of grief: other people are checking on you for a long time - for good reason. But that’s hard for me- I wasn’t built to be needy, to mope or even be able to answer “...

Day 2 - The NICU

The NICU is a place you are extremely grateful for but you also dread its existence. You are so thankful that your fragile baby has around the clock expert care but you also hate that your baby has to be there without you. And then when you are there you feel awkward - you’re the mother but his caretaker is the nurse - you have to ask permission or for help to hold the baby (so many lines/drains so it’s not easy to pick them up). It’s also just heartbreaking to see the other babies that have been there for weeks or even months. Jack’s isolette/crib/bed was next to a baby born at 24 weeks (on April 8 actually) and it was July 12… he was still tiny with a young mom who we witnessed have hard conversations about her capacity to care for such a tiny fragile baby. The baby on the other side was born via c section because his organs were on the outside of his belly (omphalocele) and he cried and cried and cried. (We actually had a mom bring a baby with this same diagnosis to our house i...

Transitions

This past week, Ike and I both finished working. Ike had been working as a project manager with Shickel Corporation over the last three years and I was at the hospital for two and a half years, first as an inpatient clinical dietitian and then the last 7 months as an outpatient dietitian and clinical nutrition manager. Transitions are hard! Saying goodbye to really good things is difficult but freeing, it is sad but sweet to feel so loved in our work places, and scary but really exciting as we look toward next year. The last few days were spent away - first with friends at a cabin outside Harrisonburg and then Ike and I went to Asheville to explore a new place together and celebrate the end of work and beginning of a different pace. We anticipate the next month to be slower without the stress of working 40+ hour weeks but also packed with making time to see family and friends, a few Christmas parties, Christmas in VB, and then packing and movi...

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