Going Home Without a Baby

Until the modern era, the business of having a baby was extremely dangerous.  Between infant mortality rates, undiagnosable problems in utero and maternal death in childbirth (Downton Abbey spoiler...do not read this until you've finished Season 3...I cried, cried my eyes out for Cybil and Tom, not just because of how heart-wrenching it was, but also because of how realistic it was for the time period), becoming a nun seemed like a good option.  Nowadays, you expect to go to the hospital and come home with a baby.  But the fact is, it's not always true.  I do know women who gave birth to still born babies-I hope that I never know their devastation.

By the end of the 3rd day post-baby, I was ready to go home.  I wanted a bed and different clothes.  I wanted an uninterrupted night's sleep-I promise, my temperature and blood pressure doesn't change over the course of 3 hours.  As I was packing the charge nurse came in to do my exit paperwork.  "Just so you know, we've been evaluating you over the past couple of days and we just want to let you know that you are very low on the spectrum for getting postpartum depression."  How do you react to this?  I mean, I noticed that the nurses were all asking me the same questions and writing down parts of my responses, but I didn't realize that they were evaluating me.  And how did they come up with this miraculous prognosis?  Did they stay up with me while I cried at night?  Did they accompany me to the NICU when I realized that after about 10 minutes I couldn't look at my daughter anymore because I was too scared?  Could they tell the difference between healthy adjustment and complete numbness?  "Oh, okay," was the only response I could muster.

Like a miscarriage, I don't think you can understand what it's like to go home without your baby unless it has happened to you.  You sit in the lobby, waiting for your car, and you watch the other new parents go home with their babies strapped into car seats, the babies wearing their "take me home" outfits, and you know that you have the most adorable "take me home" outfit on hold at the baby store and you wonder if your child will ever be able to wear it.  Everything inside of you collapses or liquefies or dies, just dies.  Your heart aches in that cliche way that pain is described-and you realize it's a cliche for a reason, like jokes about Jews being cheap, because sometimes it's true.  Those parents, they carry balloons and flowers and the husband holds open the door and the mom climbs in back to sit with the baby and here you are just silently dying inside because you can't cry in public.  Once I was alone I cried out everything that had liquefied inside of me.

My parents took me back to the hospital later that evening so I could see the baby again.