To be sad at other people's lives and children

[TheBuffster]

I am so sad. I have lost everything. I had a loving husband and a baby on the way, a secure job and supportive family.
Husband and I made some mistakes during labour and now ds is on the path to having cerebral palsy diagnosed.
My relationship with DH is in tatters. I can't stop thinking about the birth. I resent my friend's with all their pregnancy and happy families. My family are strained because of my depression and ds doesn't sleep.

I think you need to start listening to your counsellors. It may be that the cause of this irrational self-blame for CP is related to past trauma in your life. They will have seen this excessive self-blame in mothers before.

DS may well have already had CP as other posters have said, there's nothing to say it was anything to do with time between waters breaking and induction. If you have read up on it you will know that there are many causes of CP, of which only one is birth trauma. And from what you've said there's no real evidence that DS did suffer birth trauma. But if he had, it's not your fault anyway.

Many babies have traumatic births. I choked during birth and came out blue with the cord round my neck. I was in an incubator for a week. I'm ok.

You also need to work on in therapy the idea that CP = ruined baby, ruined life etc. There are amazing people with this condition who live full and wonderful lives.

@TheBuffster - this isn’t it now. Your baby will continue to grow and develop, and over time, with more rest, love and support, your brain will start to process your life and sense of guilt differently. At the moment, you are still comparing a fantasy life, where everything went brilliantly and you never encountered any difficulties, with your current reality, and your brain is focusing on what is negative and awful about now, sticking the knife in a bit more by telling you that it’s actually your fault, imagining the worst scenario in terms of prognosis for your baby, then extending all that into a neverendingly bleak future, and then sticking the knife in even more by telling you that everyone else has it much better and that they are all happy with entirely “normal,” happy children and lives. None of what you think is reality, it’s just your current perception and that is not set in stone, it’s just unbelievably hard to get out of when you are still close enough to what happened to still be grieving and traumatised, and exhausted due to having a baby that makes you feel sad and guilty at the moment. Your feelings are normal and unpleasant. This stage of the trauma you are going through does not last forever.

What you are feeling is totally normal. I have 2 dc’s with disabilities, they are now teens but I still feel resentment towards people with their perfect dc and perfect lives, I think it’s normal to feel that way but it does lessen. Please don’t look at others with CP and think that’s how your DS will turn out, there are different levels of CP the same with most conditions and your DS will be unique the same as any child. Don’t be hard on yourself, don’t blame yourself, just keep moving forwards

@TheBuffster
This is neither of your faults.
Was it a home birth that encountered probs?

Hospitals were not functioning normally this year, as we all know.

You don’t know yet if your son has CP, and there are many types of it.

When we are pregnant , we imagine a healthy child, but it is a lottery.

Remember that on social media people are only putting their best side forward, a carefully curated and posed slice of life.
1% cherry
99% shit🙂.

Since starting investigation no one apart from me has explored cause I honestly don’t think knowing the cause will help, it was not your fault. I say this as a mum to a cheeky, kind, intelligent 4yr old with CP. Your beautiful DS is here and hopefully once you get the official diagnosis, that should be the doorway to proper support and assistance for your son (and you). Honestly I can say it does get easier to handle. Sometimes appointments are hard and come with new hurdles as the child grows, I won’t lie but you will find a way to manage. What I will say is you need to protect yourself emotionally too, DO NOT compare your life to someone else, DO NOT compare your son to other children. Your son is not defined by his CP ❤️

It sounds like you need counselling and support to get you through a very normal stage of grief for the life you thought you were going to have. I know it’s easy for us to say but please be kind to yourself. You made decisions during labour that lots of women make and many of their babies are born without neurological complications. It isn’t your fault [hug]

Oh bless you. It is highly unlikely that anything you did or didn't do caused the CP. In my area the advice is not to go to hospital for 48 hours after your waters break, if labour hasn't started. However, it may feel easier for you to blame yourselves, than to face the awful fact that there may be no reason for this, and no one to blame.

Maybe you need to blame yourself at the moment, because that's something tangible that you can do. It sounds as if your therapist isn't hearing you, and isn't hearing how you feel. And lack of sleep won't be helping you either. You must be exhausted.

(My ds had a very similar sleep pattern. DH and I prioritised sleep for us, to help us survive. I went to bed from 7pm once or twice a week, and slept undisturbed until 1am, then took over from dh. That six hours undisturbed sleep got me through the week. You need to look after you, in order to look after your little one - like those aeroplane masks: put yours on before helping your children.)

Take care of yourself, and keep posting here. MN is a wonderful resource of experience, encouragement and handholding.

My best friend at primary school had cerebral palsy. She was witty, fun to be around and had the best sense of humour. She was also top of the class. I was heartbroken when her parents decided to send her to a special school and I never understood it because she was doing fine in mainstream (obviously there must have been something behind that decision but as a child I didn't know what it was).
Please don't blame yourself. But you need to recognise that you still have an amazing baby who loves you and has no idea he has CP. He might not hit the same milestones as other babies at the same time, but if he loves you, and you love him, that's what's important. I say that as someone who had excessive guilt and severe PND after my baby was born last year. Are you getting support from any groups for parents of children with additional needs? There was an amazing charity in my area called ABC which was to help women with traumatic childhoods to bond with their babies, my HV referred me, you might have something similar in your area.

No words @TheBuffster

I know it must seem dreadfully bleak right now and I'm so sorry you are going through this.

A friend of mine has a daughter with CP amongst other conditions. She recently posted this on her Instagram and I hope it can give you some peace of mind that it can and will get better and your child is beautiful just for being them. ❤️

"Welcome to Holland" By Emily Perl Kingsley, 1987. All rights reserved.

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......
When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."
"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."
But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away...because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss. But...if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

TheBuffster I have nothing medically useful I can say, but I wanted to send and add that none of this is in anyway your fault.

Oh OP, you sound so sad. I have a DC with autism and spent years trying to find the fault in something I did or didn't do. I went 92 hours from waters breaking to induction which was within NICE guidelines. DD had terrible jaundice and struggled to feed and we got fuck all support even in non COVID times. I wasn't even aware CP was a risk with delaying induction. It's not your fault, honestly. Try to stop blaming yourself and save that energy for dealing with diagnosis and seeking all the support you can. It will get better.

Not.
Your.
Fault.
This may well not be the tragedy you think.
For now though, just hold on.
Hold on to your baby, hold on to your DP, hold on to your hopes.
Focus not on what's happened but how you deal with it.
It's utter shit and it's not fair and you shouldn't have to but you will find the strength you need.

It's just so sad to think this is it now.

In the nicest possible way, it really isn't. You're 10 months in. Things will change. The fact that they are investigating it so early is a good thing as early intervention with physio is the absolute best you can do for your baby. I told you earlier about my son with cerebral palsy. When he was born his twin brother died. DS was in hospital for 3 months and had a grade 3 bleed on the brain. When we asked about possible disabilities the doctors sat us down and said we'd have to wait and see if he could take sucking feeds by himself and go from there. Let me tell you that at 9 years old he walks half a mile a day to school every day, reads two paperback novels a night and makes the most godawful puns. He didn't even realise that he might be disabled until he was 7. It's just his norm.

Myself, I was in a deep fucking hole. I still live with awful guilt, but I've reached the point where logically I can see it wasn't my fault, even if I can't quite believe it. The guilt and sadness don't go away but you learn to live with it and to cope with it and life gets so, so much better. I also found (and still do) that I cope better at different times of the year. At 10 months you are approaching the one year anniversary and your mind will be drawing on all those horrible memories. This again is something you can cope with and will get easier. It's so hard, but there is hope.

I agree it is not the right thread for this comment. Have requested it be removed.

Be kind to yourself. Being depressed is a natural reaction to difficult circumstances. When my ds was diagnosed as autistic, I tried to pretend I was fine when in fact I was having secret panic attacks and struggling to function. I should have sought help and didn't until much later. I regret that. If you think the psychologist is unhelpful, seek out a different counsellor. It might also be worth looking at the counsellor's approach and thinking about what is and isn't helpful for you right now. You will move forwards.

There is nothing from the account of your son's birth that indicates that you and your husband are at 'fault'. You made the best decisions and choices at the time, with the available information that you had.

Now you are here with a little baby who needs you and your husband to move beyond the blame stage of grief and move towards supporting each other.

You have got through trauma in the past, you are strong op, you and your husband can find a way through this.

As many posters have pointed out, your child will develop how your child develops and they may have different challenges - but your baby is a person. And you are going to love this person for all the quirks and strengths and personality that your baby has - not for what they are not.

@Jinglealltheway22

OP I'm a clinical negligence solicitor.

If your baby does have cerebral palsy it could well have happened even before your waters broke.

A baby can sustain a brain injury during a perfectly standard labour and delivery in the best of hands.

Labour is a risky business, it's just not talked about enough.

Thinking of you. If your psych support isn't helpful, ask to see someone else, it's important you connect with your therapist

Labour is a risky business and I do wish this was discussed more. Bad birth stories are swept away and does little to help people like the OP who are actually experiencing an all too common situation which is more than likely just pure bad luck.

But because of the many filters around birth that are applied by society when things go wrong (as is a very common occurance) parents are left feeling isolated, like they are the only people something like this happened to and therefore it must be their fault rather than another example of something that’s fairly common.

Unfortunately mental health can be profoundly affected very suddenly. The best advice I can offer is not to keep saying I used to be like x. In the gentlest way that exact you has gone, it has to be that old you was designed to operate in the past. Let go Don’t desperately try to get the old you back and become fixated on it. Try and focus on the bits of the old you that you think would be useful going forward and nurture them and learn about a new you with the old elements. Almost invariably you will create a much stronger and better version of you than you could ever have envisaged, one fit for your present. If you can’t change therapist for whatever reason. Equip yourself with knowledge. Start mending your own mind, take back control. Counselling, whilst very helpful is very rarely a final magic bullet, rather it is the instigator of a lot of self work and a guide to setting you off on a lifelong journey.

OP the way you feel is normal and understandable but please believe us, this is not your fault

My waters broke and we waited 48 hours to get induced

It’s not your fault. My waters broke early for two of my DC. My midwife told me it was ok to wait (I went into labour 3 or 4 days later with each of them).

It’s easy to try to find a ‘reason’ why you’re to blame. One of my DC has SN and I did used to go over things in my head, but now I realise it wasn’t my fault.

Please be kind to yourself and talk to anyone who you feel can help. Best wishes to you all. XXX

I don’t mean to be that person, but I absolutely detest Welcome To Holland. I’m glad it’s helpful for some people, but for me I find it very patronising and not at all reflective of how I’ve felt over the last few years. I don’t think you can compare having a healthy typical baby and having a disabled baby to two different European countries. I felt more like I was on another planet entirely for a very long time - lots of uncertainty, lots of bombs going off, things feeling manageable one minute and then the ground falling out from under you the next.

I still do feel like that a lot of the time (Christmas has been especially tough to be honest but that has been my fault for expecting too much), but most of the time I’ve adjusted to how things are. And at the time people telling me that really pissed me off as I didn’t think I would ever adjust, but we all have.

You will get out from this awful oppressive pain, having more information will help, seeing your baby make progress will help. Finding a support network who understand will help. Bit by bit it will become more manageable, I promise.

OP you are NOT to blame. I was in the same position and was just 'pooh-poohed" when I asked if there were any risks to waiting rather than being induced when my waters broke early. They told me that 'baby's lungs would develop better' and the only real risk might be 'jaundice' which she did have.

This is a crap time for you and even worse due to everything that's going on in the world...but you will get through this.