Welcome to the World Little Bro!

He’s here!!! I have an alive baby (calling him “A” for now), and he is outside of my body. It is insane. I still sometimes wake up in shock.

I have so much to say but:

1. I have no time to write it down
2. I’m way too tired
3. I probably make very little sense due to #2.

I knew I owed you all an update, and I have gotten a few thinly veiled “…how are you doing??” texts because people are afraid to ask pointedly, “are you and your baby alive?”

Here are a few short updates in bullet form because sentences are hard:

• Labor and delivery went extremely smoothly. I think that was a gift from Maliyah because she knew I couldn’t handle any extra complications. We only had one very short scare (which of course sent me spiraling and sobbing), but otherwise everything was quick and uneventful.
• I have definitely cried far more than A has. He was born with so much hair and I keep saying I think saltwater makes it grow because the first few weeks I was basically crying on it constantly.
• The grief of being in the same hospital with an alive baby was a LOT.  Even just being discharged should have been joyful but it was complicated. Discharge for normal patients is at 11 am. This time we left with a group of new parents with babies in car seats, and a bustling hospital lobby. It was so starkly different from being discharged at 10 pm on a Sunday night, empty handed.
• Things are BUSY with a baby but also extremely NOT busy. It’s hard to explain but if you ask me what I did in a day, I’ll say both “nothing” and “oh my god I’m so exhausted.”
• I do NOT know how single moms do it. Because my husband went back to work after 2 weeks and he still comes home at night, and it is a CHALLENGE. And twin moms??? Good grief. I don’t know how. I said “moms” mostly because of feeding. Which brings me to my next point.
• Breastfeeding??? What in the literal f&^% how come no one is talking about this unique form of torture???? It hurts if you do it, it hurts if you don’t. Everything hurts. Boobs. Shoulders. Back. Neck. Brain.
• The stress of feeding is exacerbated by the fact that A was a little small. He was fine, and didn’t need any time in the NICU, which I was extremely grateful for, but he was almost a full pound smaller than I thought he’d be. I know the growth scans can be wrong, but I was thrown off. I immediately went to, “he’s starving. He’s dying.” Spoiler alert, he was not starving. But the adjustment of my expectations, especially when I am LONG LEGS BIG CITY and he was “tiny bean,” was hard.
• I thought that the solo assignment was the pregnancy and the “keeping an alive-baby alive” was the group project portion. Why does breastfeeding make it feel like an extension of the solo assignment? I was not prepared for that feeling of, once again, being solely responsible for keeping him alive.
• Being a loss mom makes this extra hard. On bad days I think, “my body already killed one baby, why wouldn’t it malfunction, not produce enough food, and kill another?” On good days I think, “there’s formula and he will be fine.” And then my husband can help.
• Last year, I became acutely aware of just how tied my physical and mental health are. The body keeps the score. This is once again a reality with sleep deprivation. A social worker I spoke to said, at some point, you need to prescribe yourself sleep. It’s like a medication, you need it, your body needs it, and lack of it is cumulative. I can literally watch how my lack of sleep impacts my blood pressure and it’s true, sleep is necessary. We’re working on it.
• Related… blood pressure. It’s stressful to have a human rely on you! I have been back to the hospital once since discharge, 7 days post-partum. Talk about continuing re-traumatization. Again, they took my blood pressure in triage. Again, it was severe range. Again, I had an IV put in. Again, they had the blood pressure cuff going off every 15 minutes. Again, they had to put the pulse ox on my middle finger because it had lighter nail polish. And this time, I was thinking, “now if I die, A has no mom.” Cue more tears. Thankfully they seem to have everything under control now and I’m a different dosage of meds and monitoring everything extremely closely at home.
• I had a loss mom ask me how loving A is different than loving Maliyah and how I could love anyone more than Maliyah. It was such an interesting question that was difficult to answer with my currently-limited mental capacity. But the main answer is… it’s so different. With Maliyah, I always felt like she knew I loved her, and she couldn’t tell me otherwise. I had no way to reinforce that thought either way, so I just had to believe that what I was doing/saying/writing/feeling was enough. With A, it’s like… is it enough? Does he KNOW? If he does, why is he crying so much? There’s a live feedback loop that always makes me feel like I’m not doing enough.
• My main struggle at the moment is trying to find a community. I love my loss moms so much. I loved my Pregnancy After Loss weekly support group. And now, I’m alone. I’m still a loss mom, but now I have what so many loss moms desperately want so I am not fully in the group anymore. And I am definitely not a normal mom. I’ve tried a little bit of convo with other moms and it’s good to know some of our worries are the same, but sometimes mine feel so much more serious because I immediately go to full catastrophe mode. Like A was small, and I could have just put him in newborn-size clothes, but I was terrified the fabric would somehow ride up over his face and he’d suffocate. I couldn’t sleep at all until we got him preemie clothes and a zipper swaddle (these things are life-changing).
• Also related to not relating to moms, it’s really difficult for me to ask for or listen to advice. I know moms with living kids know better, they have done this before. They have feeding tips, sleep tips, etc. But I should have done this before. I should know what I’m doing because I should have an 18-month-old. But I don’t, I have a newborn and I never got to do any of this with Maliyah. Any time moms say, “this worked for me,” I hear, “I know better because my baby lived.” And the hard part is, they’re always right. I don’t know what I’m doing. This is new to me. But it’s hard to hear because I know how my story should have gone. It’s a lot of mental work to push down my thoughts of inadequacy and instead accept advice and tips.
• At our first pediatrician appointment 3 days after A was born, the doctor said, “you’re both new at this, you’re both learning.” I try to channel that energy and remember that we are figuring this out together.

A is sleeping right now, which means I know I should be sleeping too, so I’ll finish this post off with a shoutout to my husband. He has been exceeding my expectations at every single turn. He has been watching out for both my mental and physical health. He was the one who pushed us to go back to the hospital when I needed to. He is the one who advocated for going to a post-natal retreat so we could relax and ease into this new life, and learn crucial skills. He has purchased (and assembled) all of the baby stuff in the house to make sure we are as well-stocked and comfortable as possible. This included finding a service that delivered preemie size diapers within an hour. He has been changing diapers and feeding A like a champion, and sleeping in shifts despite already being back at work. As I said before, I do not know how single moms do it, and I’m so grateful to have a partner in this and in everything. A few days ago, I said to him, “you know, I still love Maliyah,” and he said he does, too. We’re in a new chapter of our story, and I’m so thankful to have had him in my previous ones, and I’m excited to have him in my future ones as well.