pour my soul out

CW: Medical trauma of a child

Note: Excerpts from my notes are unedited, with the exception of the removal of names. Otherwise, they appear exactly as I wrote them at the time.

I am sitting in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of Primary Children’s Hospital, next to my week-old daughter’s hospital bed. I am exhausted, terrified, still bleeding and sore from childbirth. My brain is reeling, and so I pull out my phone.

11/4/21, 11:39 AM:

Time doesn’t exist here. 

There are no minutes or hours, there are shift changes and rounds. I have no idea what day it is, let alone what time of day. 

Parents float through the hallways with hollow, exhausted eyes and tear-stained cheeks. There is crying everywhere. Children cry because they are in pain. Parents cry because their children are in pain. 

---

Three days before, on my daughter’s sixth day of life, she stopped breathing. I may never forgive myself for this, but I wasn’t even the one who noticed. I had developed mastitis, and was floating through the day in a fevered haze. My husband was the one who saw that our tiny daughter, resting peacefully in her rocker, had turned a strange color.

11/2/21, 11:10 AM:

She turned blue, and limp. We pounded her back, ran her head under cold water, and she started to pink up again. We rushed her to the ER, where it happened again. And again. 

In the emergency room, there are sounds and sensations and not much else. As I watch my daughter turn blue, again, time slows down. My daughter is dying and no one is moving fast enough. Someone says, she’s seizing. Someone else radios for a doctor. In seconds that feel like hours, there is a crowd around her tiny body, so many people that she has been swallowed by the throng. I can hear her tiny cries as they attempt to place an IV. At least she’s breathing again. Somehow I end up in a chair, and they are asking me questions I don’t know how to answer, what is her date of birth, who is her pediatrician, were there any complications with your labor?

It feels like an eternity, and a million terrible things happen, but eventually my precious newborn is placed on a ventilator and loaded onto a helicopter, and I find myself sitting in a dark PICU room, listening to the little boy on the other side of the curtain wail. I stare at the notes app of my phone, because there is nothing I can do but pour my soul out onto the screen.

11/2/21, 3:51 PM:

…I will never get over any of these things. Every other minute the thought crosses my mind that we could lose her, and I want to throw up every time. 

---

By some miracle, my baby was discharged from the hospital ten days after her incident — stable, but without an official diagnosis. That diagnosis would come, but in the meantime, and for a long time after, I found myself wading through grief and fear and the sense that because I did not lose my daughter, I had no right to feel like I had been robbed of something.

My husband and older daughter had their own versions of the trauma we collectively experienced, but my daughter was too young, and my husband too stoic, to fully understand or address the many emotions swirling through me. So I held them inside, and saved reality for my notes. I had not written anything substantial in years, but in the cracks of my motherhood, the words became a testament to my grief.

11/29/21, 4:07 PM:

“Mama not sad” 

I heave a heavy sigh. “No, Mama’s okay.” 

I tell her I’m okay, because how do I explain to her the weighty darkness inside of me? How do I explain to my two-year-old that while I am not, currently, curled up on the floor in tears, I am still, in some way or another, very sad?

There are so many spoken and unspoken expectations when you become a mother. Give it all to your children, put yourself aside, keep complaints to a minimum, if you must complain at all. Mothers who lose children are allowed to break down for a time, but must eventually pull themselves together to be the picture of strength in adversity.

Mothers who almost lose children, on the other hand, must show nothing but gratitude. So thankful for the second chance that they have with their child. Every time I talk about my daughter’s experience, I temper any expressions of anger or grief with, but of course, we’re so thankful. It could have been so much worse. I didn’t believe that I had any reason to feel the pain I was feeling, because it could have been so much worse.

So the notes were all I had. Eventually, I would find a therapist, a wonderful woman who reminds me of my mother, who would help me untangle the knots of my anguish, give me permission to grieve, and teach me to hold sorrow and hope at the same time.

And eventually, the notes evolved. They shifted from scraps of pain to snippets of ideas, little moments that came to me as I went through the motions of parenting. I would jot them down quickly, between diaper changes and snuggles and loads of laundry.

I now fill my notes with thoughts about motherhood, about my children, about womanhood and faith and recipes I’d like to try. A habit that began in the depths of despair has turned into a ritual that keeps me connected to my completest self.

7/18/22, 1:26 PM:

I’ve always hated sun showers. 

But maybe there is something to be said about light and darkness existing in the same sky.

These moments in the margins, they are my soul. They are truth and love and pain, they are grief and joy. They are little moments, and big ones. I read them, and my heart swells, or it breaks. Writing them does not heal me. It is not about healing.

It is about witnessing.

---

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Create Anyway".