flipflop_diva

The baby is screaming.

Again.

The baby is always screaming. I can’t remember a time when she wasn’t screaming. She even screams when I feed her. When I change her. When I try to put her to bed.

Screaming, screaming, screaming.

I can’t remember when I last slept. I can’t remember when I last showered, when I last ate, when I last did anything except hold a screaming baby.

I want her to stop. I so desperately want her to stop.

Her screams fill my head. My heart pounds. My palms sweat. I feel like I’m going crazy.

I want her to stop screaming. Please just stop screaming.

•••

She is born on a Tuesday afternoon on a cold November day. We get to the hospital the night before to be induced. High-risk, my doctor says, so this is safer.

Everything starts out well. The medicine does what it’s supposed to do. I go from not being dilated at all to two centimeters dilated by one in the morning. They add a new medicine, one to increase the contractions, but the baby’s heart rate starts slowing down. They stop the meds. They give me apple juice to drink. Ten minutes later I throw it up. I feel weak, sweaty. The contractions are getting worse. The nurse checks again and now I’m up to four centimeters.

I get an IV for the pain, but it doesn’t work. Not at all. I grit my teeth against the pain until the anesthesiologist shows up, I get an epidural then, and I can finally relax. Except I can’t because I’m now fully dilated and it’s time to push.

It takes on average an hour to an hour and a half, the labor nurse tells us, as I push as hard as I can. You’re making progress, the labor nurse says as the minutes tick by.

But something is wrong. The baby isn’t coming. The labor nurse keeps having me take breaks now and then. She disappears to call my doctor.

And then comes the news. The baby might have her umbilical cord around her neck. The baby’s head is at a weird angle and it’s stopping her from coming out.

The nurse has me push a few more times, but now the news is worse. The baby’s heart rate is dropping again, and it’s not coming back up fast enough.

Suddenly there are people everywhere. My doctor saying we need to do a c-section. An anesthesiologist telling me what’s going to happen now. More nurses getting me ready.

It’s not anything that I want, but I just want my baby. Fear that we’ve come this far only to lose her now grips my whole baby. I’m crying and shaking as they wheel me down the hall.

I feel the pressure when they cut, but the curtain blocks our view. I wait for what seems an eternity when the doctor says they have her.

And then it comes. A cry. A tiny, beautiful cry that warms my heart like nothing ever has. A cry that signals she is here and she is alive and she is mine.

•••

Her cry isn’t tiny anymore. It’s not beautiful either. It echoes in my head and around the room and it never ever stops.

I hold her, I rock, I feed her, I change her. I do everything the books say to do. The screaming continues. I talk to her, I sing to her, I bounce her up and down.

And then there. Finally. Her little eyes slide closed. Relief bubbles up in me.

I put her down in her bassinet. Her eyes open. She looks at me. She screams.

I run to the bathroom, tears boiling over, anything to get away for just a moment. I look at myself in the mirror. I look tired, sad, awful. My hair is limp, my clothes stained.

I turn to the side, study the belly that won’t go away. I look down at my legs, still so swollen from giving birth. I think about the jeans in my closet that I still can’t fit into, about the bathing suits I’ll probably never wear again. I’ve always been thin. I don’t know how to deal with this, and it’s one more thing I’m failing at.

I go back to the baby, look down at her in her bassinet. I feel alone, overwhelmed, frustrated. I wish there was someone here to help, but there is no one to ask. Everyone I know is out living life — working, raising kids, doing whatever they do.

I want to tell someone how I feel, but I can’t do that either. The ones without kids won’t understand. The ones with kids will just tell me what I’m doing wrong. I know, because I tried to tell my parents.

“I don’t know how I’m supposed to pump and make extra milk when she eats every two hours,” I said a couple weeks ago.

“You’re sister-in-law pumped while breastfeeding twins,” my stepmom answered.

My dad just wanted to know why I hadn’t cleaned the house.

I keep looking down at my baby, screaming in her bassinet, her little face red and her fists waving madly in the air. I finally give in and pick her up. She screams in my ear as a thank you.

Screams, screams, screams.

I close my eyes as I shush her. There has to be something I’m doing wrong, right? Why aren’t I better at this? Why is this so hard?

I hold her and cry and wonder.

•••

Hours later, I look at her lying in my arms. So tiny. So fragile.

So loud.

I look at her little fingers, her little toes, her little neck. For just a moment I picture it. Letting her fly across the room. Making the screaming stop.

I almost drop the baby on to the couch beside me. My beautiful, innocent baby. The baby I wanted more than anything in the world. The baby I love with all my heart.

I do love her with all my heart, right?

My mind is racing. My heart is in my throat. Panic is welling up inside me.

I do the only thing I can think of to do, even though I hate to do it.

I pick up my phone. I call my husband.

“Come home,” I say. “I need help.”

Much like 'Law & Order', this is a fictionalized account of real events. The birth part is real. The struggle is mostly real, but in much smaller doses. The end is not real. I'm lucky. I don't have any signs of postpartum depression. I don't want to hurt my baby. And for the most part, I can get her to stop screaming within a few minutes. Even if I can't get her to sleep as much as she should.

But at the same time, I understand now how sometimes people can get to that point where they will do anything to just stop the screaming. And that in itself scares me a lot.

Thank you for reading! This was written for Week 10 of the