Presentation
from The Alexis Foundation Conference
Grieving And Coping After The Premature Birth Of Your Baby
There are many layers of loss associated with having a premature baby. Much of what you’ve lost is the opportunities and experiences you had looked forward to ever since you found out you were pregnant.
Your plans for the last trimester of your pregnancy and the labor and delivery come unraveled as the situation turns into a crisis.
Your dreams about meeting your baby, making eye contact, nursing, cuddling, and showing off to admiring friends and relatives—these all dissolve into the realities of a critically ill newborn who must be kept away from you and in the care of strangers in order to survive.
After recovering from delivery, you must leave the hospital with empty arms and aching breasts.
Friends and relatives are usually ignorant about what your baby must go through, and are certainly in the dark about what this is like for you.
And this is just in the beginning—there are many more losses that accumulate over the weeks and months. Even holidays, special occasions or rites of passage can be painful, as they aren’t turning out the way you had imagined many months before.
Whatever your situation-- even if your baby survives, even if the baby is healthy and developing normally, and especially if there are continuing medical or developmental problems, or if your baby dies, you have a long list of losses, big & small, that you can acknowledge.
When you can recognize what you’ve lost, you can give yourself permission to grieve. Grieving is what enables you to come to terms with painful experiences.
Because grief is so painful to endure, some people believe that grieving is something bad to be avoided or something to be gotten over as quickly as possible. But grief isn’t a problem to be solved—it’s a process that unfolds.
Grief also isn’t something you can experience in a neat progression of stages. At any time, you can experience a range of painful, sometimes bewildering feelings. Remember that grief is a fluid experience of:
sadness, anger, guilt, regrets, and failure, longing, fear, disbelief, and emptiness,
preoccupation, confusion, sleeplessness, fatigue, anxiety, irritability, hopelessness,
depression, powerlessness, tears and agony— and it can be impossible to predict how you’ll feel day to day.
There are no timetables. Instead, throw deadlines out the window. Recognize that certain things can trigger your grief anew, and accept that this will happen. Perhaps the sight of a big pregnant belly moves you to tears; a newborn snuggled in arms fills you with longing; the time of year you associate with the delivery brings annual melancholy.
Whatever you are dealing with, remember that your feelings are valid and normal, and you are not alone.
How do you cope? Sometimes, especially early on, it may feel like you don’t. And that’s okay. Give yourself permission to fall apart, to give up responsibilities, to spend time alone with just your feelings—because in fact, doing this can be a key to your ability to cope.
back to index
go to next page