Know My Pain

March 26, 11:38am: Article in the StrongMother Guide

That night, lying in a hospital bed, waiting for a c-section that I didn't want and would do anything to get out of, I thought, "If I could stop being pregnant right this second, I would do it." I thought, "What if I just leave the hospital, right now?" My husband is a very by the book person, so I'd have to leave him too, or he would talk me into going back. I'd have to run away. Before that night, I had been pro-life, and I never would be again, and it has never stopped weighing on me. The anger. The guilt. The knowing. The understanding of how women have to make some of the hardest decisions in life, and then learn to live with them.

I don't know of any person who has ever slept soundly at a hospital, but I didn't sleep that night. I begged God, I did 9000 cat/cows, I bargained the universe with anything and everything I thought that I could. If only the baby would flip. If only my blood pressure would go down.

I wasn't going to do any apologizing in this, because I am coming to terms with myself now, three years later, but I should apologize to the nurses would dealt with me the next three days. It wasn't your fault that having a csection was so traumatizing for me. It wasn't your fault that the baby flipped in the middle of the night only to flip back to breech position 5 hours later. It wasn't your fault that the guy doing the epidural slipped and couldn't muffle his "oh fuck" quickly enough. It wasn't your fault that my baby had come into the world earlier and more differently than I had wanted, planned, NEEDED. But I took it out on you and I know that.

Also previously to that night at the hospital, I had been against co-sleeping. But when we finally got home and it was time to put Blake into the bassinet next to us, I couldn't. I couldn't let her go. I couldn't chance that something wouldn't happen to her while I was sleeping. So I would stay awake, holding her, until the early morning hours when I couldn't take it any longer, and lose the fight against sleep, only to jerk awake hours later, SURE that I had dropped her during the night. SURE that I was the reason that she was going to be dead.

People tried to be kind. They tried to be comforting. I lost track of the amount of times that people said, " At least she's here now, and she's safe". Enough times that I wanted to watch the world burn around me if a person said it one more time. Didn't they know that she had ALREADY been safe, inside of my body? That I had kept her safe for 37 weeks and I could have kept doing it, but that choice had been taken from me?
My baby had been taken from me.

We moved her into her own room after three weeks, because I thought it would help if she wasn't right next to me. Maybe I would be able to get some sleep. Instead, I watched the baby monitor all night. Was she still breathing? Was she about to wake up and cry? Was she hungry? I set an alarm clock for every two hours and would get up and wake her up and feed her, even when she didn't want it or need it. Because I wanted it. I needed it. And then I'd lay her back down, and go back to watching the baby monitor.

I took Blake to the Wesley Breastfeeding Clinic multiple times a week. Was she getting enough to eat? Was I slowly killing her because I didn't have enough milk and just didn't know it? Can you weigh her just one more time, please?

I started writing a book after the first few months. About the things that I'd want Blake to know if I died before she was old enough for me to teach them to her. If I wasn't staring at her baby monitor, I was rolled over having a panic attack at the thought of bringing a baby into this world. A world full of pain and hard choices and death. I had done this. How selfish was I? Did I want a child so much that I was willing to subject them to the possibility of living a hard life? A life without a mom? I would wake my husband up in the middle of the night, just to sob in his arms until I could calm down enough to roll back over to the baby monitor, to resume my watch.

It got worse during the Kavanaugh trial. I feel like if you're a mom of a daughter, I shouldn't have to explain this to you. The fear and the rage that went into watching Dr. Ford bare her soul in front of a television audience, and having people mock her. What if that was my child?

I refused to let anyone else watch her. I barely let anyone else hold her. When she was six months old, we had a wedding to go to in the Kansas City area that was adults only. My mom said that she would watch Blake over night, but I couldn't. I couldn't leave my child in another city for an extended period of time. Any time.
In the end, my mother in-law flew from Colorado, drove to Kansas City, and stayed at our hotel with the baby while we went to the wedding. AND THEN FLEW HOME. I will never stop being thankful for having her in my life, and for all of the times that she could have said, "Jesus Chelsey, get the fuck over this" and didn't.

Have you read Dark Matter? It has to do with alternate universes and it's a mind trip even if you aren't in the middle of postpartum anxiety. One day I was sitting in my therapist's office and I asked her how I was supposed to know if this was still my real life, or if I had slipped into an alternate universe? I was so tired and so worn out, and sometimes I thought that maybe I had actually died in the hospital that day, and this was just a new kind of life, a new kind of hell.

Blake was a year and a half before we took her to the Y and let her be in the Kidzone. I met with the director of the Y. I met with the director of Kidzone. I took Blake in multiple times a week to see the staff but not taking her inside. I was in a hell that I could not escape, where I could not stop worrying about what ifs and also needing alone time so badly that I might scream if it didn't stop.

I lost friends who didn't understand why I wouldn't leave the house. Who didn't understand why I wasn't as fun anymore.

I was sitting in the parking lot of the downtown YMCA one day, sixteen months into Blake's life, sobbing, so tired, begging a God that I wasn't even sure I believed in any more, to just give me some relief. To not make me feel this way anymore.

It got better. But I was adamant that I was never doing this again. I was never having another child. I was never putting myself through an experience like this again.

And then I got pregnant.