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Parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion we learn for others, having been through this mess — and see it reflected back at you, acknowledged and understood.

Thanks to photographer Xin Li and to artist Stephanie Sicore for their respective illustrations and photos.

for one and all > Cannot move past my guilt

Since my daughter was born premature in April I have been paralyzed by my guilt. I was hospitalized a week before she was born because my water broke prematurely. I was being constantly monitored by doctors, given steroids to develop my baby’s lungs, and antibiotics to protect me from infection. After five days in the hospital I started to have bad cramping. This was my first baby so I didn’t realize they were contractions. I told the nurse and doctor about them, the type of cramping, regularity of them, and they just gave me muscle relaxants and told me I would know when I was truly in labor. The contractions stopped but started again the next two nights right around the same time. I told them every night and even started some heavy bleeding and they said no, you will know when you’re in labor. I look back on it now and think I was in labor all of those nights. Why didn’t I know that? Or did I know it and was denying it? If I would have known and communicated that better they could have given me magnesium sulfate to slow labor but I never got it and my daughter was born earlier than she could have been because I did not communicate accurately what was happening, that I was in labor.

I cannot get over this and am plagued by guilt. It’s all I think about. What did I do? I could have given her more time! She could have stayed in longer! My husband was with the entire time and keeps telling me you did tell them how you were feeling but I can’t help but think I could have said to them, these are contractions, this is labor, please do something.

Does anyone have advice on how to handle the guilt? How to come to terms with the realization I could have saved my daughter?
July 3, 2020 | Unregistered CommenterLBS
LBS, I am so sorry that your daughter is not here with you. It’s terribly unfair. I think though, that your grief is playing tricks with you and making you believe things that are simply not true. I’ve been there and it’s one of the ways in which your brain can really mess with you. The truth is, even if you’d done everything right, communicated everything right, soon enough, well enough, it still might not have changed anything. As many here will tell you, babies die. They die for no reason at all, even when everything is absolutely perfect. Of course you did your best right in the moment. That is without question because that is what parents do. So please be gentle with yourself and kind too and start telling yourself how much you love your daughter, how you did everything you could but unfortunately, she died anyway. It wasn’t your fault, truly. Sending you peace, mama.
July 3, 2020 | Unregistered CommenterAB
The guilt I felt after the death of my baby was excruciating. She was my second and my first had been delivered as an emergency c-section because she was in serious distress. I had stopped feeling her move and after several hours, went to the hospital, where she was pretty quickly delivered safely. So why didn't I "save" my second daughter? I noticed she wasn't moving as she usually did in the late morning but it wasn't until 9pm or later that I finally went to the hospital and learned that she had died. WIth the experience I had, why didn't I do something earlier? I beat myself up about it for such a long time. It was words of painful wisdom from other mothers here that helped me. AB is right. We do our best in the moment. We loved our babies with all our hearts and we would never have made decisions to hurt them or especially, to cause their death. We can only see now, now that we know the outcomes, where we might have done things differently but we could not see those options then or we would have acted. I have to believe that because I know I loved her and I know I would have done anything to save her if I could have. We did our best with all the love and knowledge we had and we - and our babies - were dreadfully unlucky. Sending you a big hug LBS and some love out into the world for your daughter.
July 8, 2020 | Unregistered CommenterJen