Inconceivable (31 page)

“Remember in July when I told you I was afraid of postpartum depression? Well, I think it’s here. I didn’t sleep last night. I doubt I’ll sleep soundly for a very long time. I’m afraid of what the darkness and quiet of night will bring me.”

Dr. Read took a pen and paper from the pocket of her doctor’s coat and wrote down the number of Linda Vanderpol, a therapist.

“Call her. I’ll call her too. Bereavement after the loss of a newborn is her specialty. I’ll let her know that you need to be seen immediately,” she said. “If she thinks you need something to help you, then I’ll prescribe it.”

She handed me the paper and grabbed my hands. “You did a wonderful thing. You know that, right? I’ve seen a lot of things in my career, but nothing as special as this. It was a privilege to be a part of this journey.”

She was crying. I was crying and couldn’t find any words. I shook my head yes and looked back at the floor. I was so lucky she was my doctor.

“Dr. Read, there is one thing you can do. Could you please do something about these?”

I pointed at my swollen chest, and she laughed out of sympathy.

“No. Not a thing I can do about that. When the milk comes in, do not express any, and you’ll dry out in a few days. In the meantime, wear two bras and take some ibuprofen.”

After she left, I quickly packed my bags, and one of the nuns, who was also a nurse, helped me pile the dozens of gifts that had arrived at the hospital during my stay on a cart so that we could bring them down to the car. I asked her if she could distribute some of the flower arrangements I had received from the media and well-wishers I had never met to other patients. I couldn’t imagine taking them all home.

The nun placed them on another cart and walked out of the room to start delivering them. A few seconds after she left, I realized that I had accidentally left a gift bag from the Reliable Girls on the cart. I bolted out of my room and sprinted down the hall. I saw her waiting at the elevator.

“Wow, I didn’t know you could move that fast,” the nun said.

“There it is,” I said, pointing to a bag on one of the lower shelves. I didn’t want to stretch my stitches by reaching down to pick it up.

The nun grabbed the gift bag to hand it to me, and as she lifted it, out slid a super-size bottle of Ketel One.

“Is this what you wanted?”

I wrapped my hand around the neck of the bottle and said, “Yup. That’s what I want.”

She looked me directly in the eye.

“Oh, don’t worry. I won’t open it until I’m at home.”

She giggled like a schoolgirl, and I turned on my heels and marched back to my room with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a bottle of Apple Pucker in the other. I doubted I’d be mixing an appletini that night, but I had been on the wagon for nine long months, and if any event warranted a cocktail, this was it.

Soon after that, Sean and the kids arrived to take me home. My nurse brought me a wheelchair, and I gingerly put my feet on the footrests.

Shouldn’t I be holding a baby?
I thought to myself.

It was the third time in my life I had left the hospital after delivery without an infant in my arms, and I was sad.

If you want to hold a baby, then hold a baby!

I turned around and motioned to Sean to give me Mary Kate. He handed her over, and she snuggled in my arms. Drew and Ryan walked beside me while Sean went ahead to bring the car around. As we walked out of my hospital room, I felt strong and courageous. I was lifted by the presence of my three children.

As we rolled by the nurses’ station, I was surprised to find a crowd of a dozen nurses, Dr. Read, and a few other hospital employees. They handed me a card they had all signed that said how privileged they felt to have been part of this event. I thanked them. I couldn’t have chosen a better group of professionals to be involved in our care.

That night, before I went to bed, I checked my e-mail, hoping for a message about Logan. I hadn’t heard from Shannon and Paul since they left the hospital and was desperate for updates about him. Indeed, there was a message, but it was just four sentences. Apparently, the Morells had slipped out of the hospital without any trouble. Shannon wrote that she was hoping to get her girls to preschool this week. The message had nothing about the baby.

Was this the way it was going to be?

I stared at the message for a while and then sent her a reply.

Glad to hear everything went smoothly for you. I hope you are able to get back to normal as soon as possible. Give Logan a kiss from us.

I could have told her I had been discharged, but I wasn’t sure if she cared. I could have asked her questions about Logan, but I wasn’t sure if she thought that was my business.

Does she care? Is Logan my business?

Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly, I thought. I was feverish and in pain, and I was completely exhausted. Some of this had to be hormones. I couldn’t stop sobbing. My milk was coming in, and I had no baby to feed. I shook off the chilly message and went up to bed.

I knew I needed sleep, but when I shut my eyes and started to drift off, I found myself in a dark and stormy sea. I had fallen overboard, and I could barely stay afloat. Just out of reach in the turbulent waters, I could see my baby, but I couldn’t get to him. He was sinking. I kicked and paddled desperately, but he disappeared under the water. I woke, panting and dripping with sweat. I was drowning. My baby was gone, and the terror was real. I felt like I had lost everything. That night I didn’t even feel God. I was empty.

Perhaps this wasn’t about Logan. Maybe it was about the baby that Jennifer was carrying for us. I felt like something was wrong with my baby. I tried to shrug it off, but I was tossing around. I didn’t want to wake Sean. I went downstairs and checked my e-mail. There was another message from Shannon. This one was filled with details about Logan’s first moments with his sisters and tidbits about how much he was adored by his grandparents. I was thankful for the message. Whatever possessed Shannon to e-mail me a second time that night I don’t know, but thank goodness she did. I don’t know what I would have done without that message.

Maybe you will get to be a part of his life.

After I read that message and knew Logan was well, I wondered about my dream and became convinced that something had happened to my baby. I thought of the ultrasound of our baby we received while I was in the hospital, and it occurred to me that I didn’t know Jennifer was going for an appointment that day. I wondered if there was something wrong and no one wanted to tell me. I shot
off an e-mail to her, asking if all was okay. The next morning she wrote back that the ultrasound was from a routine appointment and the baby looked great.

I hung on to the hope of our unborn child, and it kept me going as I tried to accept my new reality. I thought about Logan no less than I thought about Drew, Ryan, and MK. My new life included a perpetual state of wondering. What was Logan doing right then? Was he happy? Was he sick? Was he crying? Who was loving him this very moment? I didn’t wonder about Drew, Ryan, and MK like this because I knew the answers to these questions. For a mother to have to wonder…constantly…is not a great way to live. I guess I knew he was alive, and that was a gift…unless he was being mistreated. I was spooking myself, because there was no reason to think that he was being anything but loved and adored.

At night before I fall asleep, I say my prayers and ask the angels to fly my love to my children. I’ve always imagined that my mom does the same for me—that her love comes to me at night and that it’s the one thing that will always be. It helps me sleep too. When I got home from the hospital, I added Logan to my nightly prayer. I prayed that the angels would carry my love to Drew, Ryan, MK, and Logan. I imagined that when my love reached him, he was warmed by it and could relax into a peaceful sleep. That connection I felt to him from our time together was still strong for me. I genuinely felt like he was my baby.

Logan made me proud, gave me peace, caused me to grieve and to cry, sometimes all of it in the space of an hour. Buffeted between these strong bursts of feelings, I found it hard to navigate my way through the day. I hoped that the appointment I had scheduled at the end of the week with the counselor Dr. Read recommended could help me make sense of what I was feeling.

When I arrived at Linda Vanderpol’s office, I was immediately comforted by her kind smile and complete understanding of the grief that was overwhelming me. Dr. Read had spoken with Linda
since I made the appointment, so Linda knew the basics of my story. That meant that I couldn’t fill up the time with the chronology of our last nine months and then skip out the door. I could sense how close to the surface all my emotions were, and I didn’t want to parade them before a woman I barely knew. Yet all she had to do was ask a simple question and it all came tumbling out.

“How are you dealing with your feelings of loss?” she asked.

“Not well. It’s not just the loss of Logan, it’s the loss of our dreams for our family,” I said. “I always thought I would be the ‘mommy’ and that my kids would grow up in my house, under my watchful eye, with my kisses being given to them every day. To know that there is a child out in the world that I gave life to, but he doesn’t know me, is hard. Every grain in my being is saying that he is my baby and it’s my job to protect him. I am his mother. My body gave him life but somehow didn’t earn it. It breaks my heart to think about it. There were times when people referred to me as a surrogate for the Morell family. That sickens me. I wanted a baby for our family. But what I wanted and what I intended are suddenly meaningless.”

“Do you feel isolated? Do you have friends you can lean on?”

“Oh, I have plenty of friends, and they are great women. The kind of friends who will be there for you no matter what,” I said, thinking of my go-to friends JoAnn, Tracy, Linda, and Ann, and I also had the Reliable Girls. “But I think most people think it is over. The pregnancy is over, the baby is gone, and we should just get over it. Get our lives back. That will never happen.”

“Do you dream about Logan?”

“Yes, I dream about him. I wonder about how he is doing. Does he miss me? Does he know that Shannon is not me?” I said. “You know, some people believe that children choose their parents. Did Logan choose us? What if he did, and we sent him away? What if he would have rather stayed with us in our family? I just don’t know. I’ll never know. So I granted compassion to Shannon and Paul, and at
some level I still feel I’ll never know if it was the right thing to do.”

“So even though you feel connected to your husband and to your friends, you fear that no one can understand what you went through.”

“Yes, no one can. Even Sean, who was right beside me. What I did is too odd, too unusual, and it’s not even recognized in a court of law,” I said. “I had no rights to the human being that was growing inside of me. He wasn’t mine. I couldn’t keep him. I could kill him, but I couldn’t keep him. There is some serious irony in that. I meant nothing. I’m not sure I could have been made to feel more insignificant. I feel like nothing.

“I wonder if I will ever get over this? Will I think about this child for the rest of my life?” I pleaded. “I have wondered if when I die and my children are called, will they call him? Will he care? Will he understand what I did for him? Will he understand that I would do it all over again? I hope the sadness of giving him up will lessen someday, but I don’t know how to stop this horrible movie that plays over and over again in my head.”

“What movie?”

“The movie of Logan’s birth. Him being taken out of my body, his first cry, his eyes opening and looking into my face, and the way he calmed when I spoke to him. When that part plays, I am so happy. But then comes the nightmare of the nurses taking him away. The terror of that moment cripples me.” I started to cry. “I hope someday I don’t feel so empty. I’m not sure that will happen, though. I think that I will just somehow be able to weave the sadness into the fabric of my life and continue to focus on the positive. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I want help to do. I want to enjoy life as I did before. I don’t want to cheat my family out of my happiness.”

“Carolyn, I know you came here for postpartum depression,” the counselor said. “But you have post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Post-traumatic stress disorder?
I thought PTSD was a diagnosis re
served for military veterans, survivors of horrific accidents, or victims of heinous crimes. What we had been through in the last eight months was soul-shaking, but did PTSD describe me? I knew that it was a serious diagnosis, one that wouldn’t be cured with a prescription and a few trips to a therapist.

“Are you sure that is what I have?”

“I have no doubt,” she said. “This is going to take a long while to heal. You have to be patient with yourself, compassionate, and I think you could use some antidepressants to keep some of your darker feelings at bay.”

I had never been on antidepressants before, but was aware that it was a treatment that could really help my mood. Still, I had always been confident that I’d never suffer from depression. Linda helped me understand that there was no way that a person gets through life without experiencing at least a mild depression at some point.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You see, Carolyn, you have not only lived through a horrific loss, you have endured eight months in which you were continually tortured,” she said. “I wish I would have seen you sooner. In order to recover, you’re going to need to cut yourself some slack, take this medication, continue in therapy, and work hard toward becoming whole again.”

I hadn’t really thought of my pregnancy as torture, but I appreciated the comparison. I knew that we had suffered profoundly and that I was continuously replaying in my head the moment of Logan’s birth, followed by the moment when they took him away from me. We had talked about our suffering many times with Kevin Anderson, but we’d always assumed that the suffering would diminish after the delivery. Now I was sure that we were going to suffer for a long time.