When I was first married I soon became pregnant with our first child. I was a glowing, but huge, pregnant woman. I was so happy. Everything was going perfectly in our little life. We had just bought a house and remodeling, I was in college, and my husband had a good job. Little did we know that heartbreak was just around the corner.
To make a long story short, it was a boy, and he was still born. We named him William. I was full term, healthy, and there were no birth defects or any other reason for the death to happen…..it just…..did. I would later in life find out that I have a rare genetic mutation that caused his death. With treatment I was able to have two beautiful girls and hopefully more in the future. Even though my future looks bright I will go through every single day reminded of what slipped through my fingers. My son…my little rascal that is defined as noise covered in dirt. I will never have that. My husband longs for a little man to follow him around, play ball, and get dirty working on cars. I never got to hear my son cry, laugh, or blow spit bubbles as a baby. I will never get to experience holding his hand while walking him into his first day of school. I will never know what kind of man he would have grown up to be (amazing, like his father, I am sure). It is amazing how I can miss someone that I never got the chance to know.
I have an aunt named Kathy who is never talked about. Many of my family members aside from my mother and her brothers know that Kathy ever existed. My grandmother had her youngest daughter who died a few days after birth because of a heart defect. My grandmother was so distraught that she cannot remember anything from time she had her and was unable to attend the funeral. My family, who were very poor, could not afford a head stone. The building that housed the records of the graveyard burned and any record of the location of Kathy’s grave.
I have always heard stories about my grandmother’s “nervous breakdowns.” Some were so bad that my mother and her siblings went to live with my great grandmother because their own mother did not know who they were. My mother was the only one to ever talk to me about these occasions and my grandmother never speaks of it…or Kathy.
I was not quite that severe, however, I did have my bouts of mental health problems after the birth of my Son. I battled with postpartum depression after all three of my children. I developed anxiety to a point that it was hindering my life. I turned on my husband and we almost divorced more than once. I found a generic and temporary comfort in places that I should not have. Why? Why am I telling two stories of loss?
Because of my experience losing my son I have had the opportunity to meet several other families who were affected by the loss of a child. Almost every mother that I meet is never the same after. How can we be? How can my life ever go back to normal after my child died inside of me? He had his last heart beat inside of me and felt his last comfort of maternal love inside of me. My voice was the only voice he knew and the only love he knew. My life has forever been changed and so has my mental health.
Nothing that I have been through has ever related to any other mental health experience. Just like soldiers have PTSD, maybe mothers who suffer a loss need a different diagnosis and a different treatment. My life and my grandmothers life are perfect examples of what this can do to a woman. It is unexplainable and unfathomable if someone has never experienced it. It is a suffering unlike any other…so why treat it like any other?
I have not found any way yet to “get over” losing him. I am currently medicated for my depression and anxiety but that only covers the symptoms. I cannot change what happened but maybe with proper therapy and treatment I can understand why I sometimes “lose my mind” or have a “nervous breakdown.” Society is more concerned with a zoo animal who grieves after their cub dies than they are about the hurting that mothers all around them go through every single day. It took years for the mental health world to recognize PTSD in soldiers, so I am sure it will take five times that for the mental health world to recognize the unique problems that mothers with a loss suffer from.
It is time to break the silence. It is time to admit that we are not okay and we are tired of putting on our masks just to make it through the day. Advocate for mental health to recognize and care about what happens to us. There is an emptiness that cannot be filled. Every single decision, good, bad, or just down right crazy, is somehow tied to our loss. What goes on inside our brains? Why are studies not being done on this? I look back on the decisions that I made when I “went crazy” and I wonder, what the hell was I thinking? What the hell was wrong with me? I was discharged from the hospital with a book called “Mommy Don’t Cry” and empty arms. No help, no phone number to call, no information on depression, nothing. That is not okay. It is time to stand up and make sure that in the future mothers are never left alone, abandoned, and no where to turn for help. If society will not recognize us and neither will the mental health world, then the only place we can turn is to each other…a community of AngelMommies.
