Topics Discussed This Month |
| continued from page 3 |
| Barb advises,
"I got myself into a real vicious circle kinda rut by thinking I was a bad person for
wishing or thinking about how drastically my life had changed by the decision to have kids
and then to have had to go through all the difficulties of bringing a preemie into the
world and then home. Try not to deny yourself those feelings. It's normal to grieve the
loss of your old life, to feel completely mentally and physically exhausted and be angry
and sad because of it. It's normal to allow yourself, to feel sorry for yourself and when
you do it, don't feel that you are being selfish or unloving or anything like that.
Believe me when I say, it's better for you to just go ahead and feel those things and come
to terms with them later than it is to try and push them down and make yourself feel bad
about thinking them...Share your feelings with your hubby even if he doesn't fully
understand. It's good for you to just "say" them and get them off your chest.
And do a little "Stewart Smalley" imitation (Saturday Night Live) and give
yourself a "Daily Affirmation"....."I 'am' a good mommy", "I 'am'
tired and 'need' sleep", "I'm a good wife...I'm just very tired right now"
etc... I remember days where I literally sat in the same spot on the sofa for 48 hours straight except to go pee and heat bottles and just "crying my eyes out" because I was exhausted in every sense of the word, stinky from no showers and dying for something to eat besides diet soda and a box of crackers that sat at my ever-growing-wider hips! It won't seem like it now, but this stage will end and it will gradually get better... Give yourself time to adjust, take help from every direction you can get it and let me tell you.... a good night's sleep will do you a wonder so if one night a week you can get a friend or relative to come over for the night, you'd feel like a new person." Gail
encourages, "I, too, kept a chart of cc's taken, bms, and even weighed
wet diapers. During our first week home, I called our ped. 4 times. I rarely ate,
rarely showered, and almost never slept. I finally broke down from this "I have to be
a super-mom" behavior after about a month. I don't know if I became as someone said
"institutionalized" or if I felt the burning need to do everything I could
possibly do right because I had felt so helpless/useless while my baby was in the
hospital... Mara offers, "I really do think that the babies make
some transformation when they finally come home. These kids who woke only moments before
their scheduled feedings were suddenly crying at any time, begging for food. The same
babies who I used to watch until they woke up would seemingly never go to sleep (and, ah,
the joys of twins -- if one slept, the other filled the silence and started to cry!)... Veronica concludes, "I think one of the reasons we often experience a difficult time emotionally when we finally get our babies home is because part of us wants it to be like what we imagine it to be for a family bringing a full term baby home: "It will be all better now that we have the baby home. Now we can get down to normal." And it still isn't "normal" and we're still traumatized and hurt and resentful, plus we have all this work to do and we're scared silly! Add a little exhaustion and we're completely distraught. But once we get to know the baby, and get to know ourselves a little better in the process, things start to come together, slowly but surely. The "how" may be different, but it does get better and better, and then it gets WONDERFUL!" |
Page 4
 back to index
 go to next page |