Horror, Depression and Abandonment

Milo was born by C-section after 3 days of induced labor failed. We were both in extreme danger. Platelets that matched my type were flown in from another city so I wouldn't bleed to death during the surgery. The surgery went well, except that I was just so sick, and so numb with terror. Part of my disease meant that I lost most of my vision (It came back). I also wasn't able to wear my glasses, and I'm pretty near sighted anyway, so I was laying in surgery, scared to death, and unable to even focus on my husband's face, which was about 6 inches from mine. When they took him out of me, Milo cried the threadiest, quietest little noise you ever heard. They held him up to show us, but I couldn't see him. Then they took him to another part of the OR and worked on him while my doctors started sewing me back up. My husband went with the baby.

After a few minutes, they were ready to wheel Milo, in an isolette, to the NICU. The doctors stopped in front of me and took Milo out. They told me to kiss him. So I did and then they were gone. My husband stayed behind with me. My mother, who was waiting in the lobby, went to the NICU. After I kissed the baby, I was absolutely positive that I wouldn't see him alive again. So I actively shut myself off from him and focused instead on how sick and how scared I was. I was also in a lot of pain, though it wasn't pain like you feel when you stub your toe or break a nail too low. It was more like "I've just been cut open and that really freaks me out and I'm too weak to say a whole sentence and I can't lift my hands and I think I'm going to die." Later, maybe 24 hours after the surgery or so, the pain became much more isolated and intense. I kept slinking down in my bed and I couldn't scoot myself back up. I had good pain medicine, but that only mostly took away the tangible pain. It didn't do a thing for my weakness or my fear or my horror.

I knew the baby was going to die. And I didn't want to see him. I didn't want to love him. My husband spent hours at a time in the NICU and would come back with reports. I never asked my husband not to tell me about the baby, but I remember wishing that he wouldn't.

I managed to stay away from Milo for 2 days, since I was still too sick to get out of bed or be moving around, but on the 3rd day, after the nurses had unplugged all of my lines, the staff started pressuring me to get around and everyone else started pressuring me to see the baby. And I don't even think they understood that they were pressuring me. Maybe they did. But they worded their invitations like "Now you can finally go see your baby! He's just beautiful," etc. Except I knew he wouldn't be. I knew he'd look like a 2 and a half pound fetus. (Actually, about a month before Milo came home from the hospital, I drove past an abortion clinic on my way to a dentist appointment, and the angry protestors all held posters of late term abortions.  The posters looked like my baby and it made me cry with horror and fury toward those people.)

I had decided before the baby was born (before I got sick), that the song I would sing to him most would be Dar Williams' "When I was a Boy." I know it's not the ideal song, but it's pretty and I really like the last line of the song, which is "And you were just like me and I was just like you." So anyway, the only armor I had as I was wheeled down the hall to the NICU, and then leaning against the sink for my first 3 minute scrub, was that I was going to sing this song for my baby. My mother parked my wheelchair in front of his isolette and went and talked to one of the NICU nurses. I looked at him. Stared at him, actually. He had this tiny bit of furry hair on his back. He looked sunburned (he was jaundiced). There was this bright lamp shining on him for the jaundice, so he had a white mask over his eyes. He was balled up on his belly with his legs tucked under him. His diaper was open to expose more skin. There were lines going into him everywhere: his mouth, both hands, both feet. He had a little splint on his arm to hold one of the lines in. There was literally more plastic in that isolette than there was baby. I started to sing: "I won't forget when Peter Pan..." And that was as far as I got. I started crying and asked to leave.

Milo was born in February 1999, in Rochester NY. During the time that he was in the hospital, there was a terrible snowstorm and the county declared a state of emergency and no one was allowed to drive on the roads. I was so thrilled that I didn't have to go the hospital on those days. It was -at least- two weeks before I willingly went to the hospital (I went almost every day, but only because my husband was pretty insistent). Milo was in the hospital for over two months, and I never stayed more than an hour with him. And usually, I could use up a good 20-25 minutes by going into a private room and pumping breastmilk.

I know this isn't exactly the same as abandoning him, since he was in the hands of professionals, and his father and grandmother were there with him almost round the clock, but I still have a lot of guilt, because I wanted to abandon him. The precious little time I spent with him while he was in the hospital was at the insistence of others. It was not out of maternal instinct or love.

Obviously, I came around. Although I spent very little time at the hospital, I did become more comfortable being around him and less frightened that he was going to die. The last time that I remember experiencing that horrified "please get me out of here I can't handle this" feeling, was when we first started actual breastfeeding (He was fed through a tube for more than a month). It was disastrous, since he was so incredibly small, I was big, and neither of us knew what the heck we were doing. Anyway, it was our 5th or 6th time trying, and Milo actually seemed to be almost getting it. He wasn't really drinking, but he was latched on and half asleep. It was very peaceful, and I was feeling peaceful. I looked at his face and watched him. I was starting to find him lovely. And then, in and instant, his eyes popped open, he gave a terrifying yell, and one of the alarms from his lines started going off. He wore a line that could tell his actual heart rate and reported the data to a computer. Normally, his heart rate ranged from 118-140 or so. When I looked at the monitor, it read 22.

I started crying as loudly and as horribly as the alarm had sounded. All I could think was ‘I was looking at him, and I couldn't tell something was wrong. Looking right at him.’  I was so horrified that the nurse took him away from me, put him in his isolette (He recovered on his own, his yell brought him back around), and just patted me for a few minutes.

Now that I am the mother of a one year old, healthy, robust little terror who sings and babbles and crawls after the kitty all day, I think "I could stop a Mac truck with my bare hands to save my baby." But back then, when I was weak and scared, I felt like I couldn't even protect myself, much less protect and love a child. But, of course, it's only when we're weak and scared that the possibility of abandoning our children really exists.

May 6, 2000