{"id":14,"date":"2018-05-12T04:37:05","date_gmt":"2018-05-12T04:37:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/?p=14"},"modified":"2018-06-04T03:06:53","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T03:06:53","slug":"jewish-duet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/?p=14","title":{"rendered":"What the f*ck do you want?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who screams that<\/em> at their newborn baby?<\/p>\n\n

Shh, Don’t Tell! stories are meant to be heard<\/strong> – in the person’s own voice – as well as for the original music. Please click above and listen, if you can! The transcript is also below.<\/em><\/p>\n

Narrator: Here are some memories of motherhood that we don\u2019t hear about so much.<\/p>\n

Becca: Dropping my baby, screaming at my baby, leaving my baby in a car seat and walking outside and actually lighting a cigarette to cope.<\/p>\n

Narrator: Becca is by far not the only mother who has done this stuff. Or felt this way:<\/p>\n

Becca: The first few weeks of his life and I had failed him continuously.<\/p>\n

Narr: Welcome to Shh don\u2019t tell \u2013 stories of parenting usually hidden or glossed over. The thing with Becca is \u2013 she\u00a0planned<\/em>. She worked for years to make her life as a parent very different from her life as a child.<\/p>\n

Becca: We just grew up very very poor. Like in 1986 we squatted for a year in a house with four men and another woman. And one of them was my mom\u2019s boyfriend. We had caseworkers at different times. CPS (child protective services<\/em>) was always a risk, always a threat, always a fear. There were good times, like living with my grandparents in southern Oregon, but there were a lot of bad times.<\/p>\n

I spent my childhood comparing my life to my friends. I\u2019d walk into a friend\u2019s house and I would see how normal things looked. I\u2019d come home and I\u2019d look in my mom\u2019s room and there was a mattress on the floor and you know, we maybe moved and we\u2019d lose toys. We would put stuff in storage and couldn\u2019t pay the storage unit rent and we\u2019d lose all our things. I don\u2019t think we paid for school pictures but maybe once or twice. And I would go to friend\u2019s house and I\u2019d see their pictures on the wall from every year\u2026 people just had their shit together. And we didn\u2019t have our shit together. And I wanted that. So that informed how I wanted to parent. And that informed how I chose to plan my family.<\/p>\n

music<\/em><\/p>\n

So I wanted to buy a house. Then we got married. I just had systems. And beliefs. That I had to hit certain benchmarks to be worthy of having a family.<\/p>\n

I went to work for this property management company, then I went to work for this default servicing company. This is 2008 now.<\/p>\n

I finally got pregnant. Two weeks later the economy tanked. There were huge paring downs, so I lost about 20% of my income, and developed a perinatal mood disorder.<\/p>\n

music<\/em><\/p>\n

I lost in my mind, all financial security. And I just spiraled.<\/p>\n

And so I started to think I had made the worst decision of my life to have children. I looked for options, considered options to get out of my family planning. Because I didn\u2019t want to be a parent on welfare, and I didn\u2019t want to be homeless. None of that was real. (laughs) None of that was possible. My husband\u2019s family is very supportive. If we were ever in a financial crisis we have our primary, alternative, contingent and emergency plans in place. But I felt like we were going straight to emergency. And I just didn\u2019t see a likelihood of that not including some kind of shame for needing help. So I just was incredibly depressed and incredibly anxious and felt so screwed over and felt like I\u2019d done everything right and I still failed.<\/p>\n

music<\/em><\/p>\n

Then when my son was born, I was in labor for 32 hours at home. And then I went to the hospital. And I napped and woke up and I pushed for 36 minutes and had a baby And he was perfect.<\/p>\n

Then two hours later he was taken to the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit)<\/em> because his breathing was labored.<\/p>\n

music<\/em><\/p>\n

So you are sitting on a hard chair, next to your baby\u2019s bassinet, and he\u2019s hooked up to all these monitors. And you\u2019re looking around. And I did what I always did, I compared my baby\u2019s vitals on the screen to every other screen in the room. And babies were going home with vitals that were not as strong as my baby. And my baby was kept.\u00a0Nobody looked at you, nobody talked to you, they just talked to each other. \u00a0I wasn\u2019t consulted. Everything happened to him. To me.<\/p>\n

And I had Bell\u2019s palsy so I looked like a freak. It attacked my facial nerve. So I lost full function of the right side of my face. I couldn\u2019t enunciate very well. I couldn\u2019t even say my baby\u2019s name. I couldn\u2019t sing to him. I thought he wouldn\u2019t know my voice. I worried that he would be damaged because he couldn\u2019t see me smile. And I was afraid they would take my baby away if I was difficult.<\/p>\n

And I just felt like I failed right out of the gate. Because I was in a health care system that didn\u2019t understand why I choose home birth. It was just really important to me to not have men making decisions about my body. Which is why I didn\u2019t want to be in the hospital.<\/p>\n

music<\/em><\/p>\n

I had flashbacks the first two years of my son\u2019s life every time I drove home from work because the hospital was on my way home from work. The flashbacks created terrible terrible moments.<\/p>\n

And so I just remember having a fussy baby that I couldn\u2019t console, and I remember screaming at him. Laying him on the bed and screaming, what the fuck do you want from me? Just shut up. Just stop crying. What the fuck do you want from me?\u00a0 And my baby shook in fear. My new baby shook in fear. And I just was devastated.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t recognize myself as a human. Who the fuck yells at a baby. (Laughs) And like, I can laugh now because he\u2019s attached like glue, I mean, he\u2019s amazing. But you know, like all of these things that happened, and now he\u2019s got ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder<\/em>). So I\u2019m like wow it\u2019s totally my fault I have a kid with ADHD. Because I had postpartum depression and anxiety. And I\u2019m a head case, and my mom\u2019s a head case. Like you just can\u2019t help but look at those things. And wonder \u2013 like you just wonder if you made the right choice to have kids. What are you forcing on your own children, you know? And I know, I know I made the right choice to have kids. But you as a mother, you go if I hadn\u2019t screamed at my baby would he have the issues he has now? If I hadn\u2019t dropped him, coming down stairs in middle of night, slipping and\u2026I dropped my baby. I didn\u2019t drop him far. I dropped him less than a foot. But I dropped my baby. In the middle of the night, sleep deprived, coming down the stairs. Who drops their baby? You beat yourself up. You just really do. And that is where I spent the bulk of my first two years of motherhood. Looking at every possible flaw.<\/p>\n

music<\/em><\/p>\n

All these things, they\u2019re\u00a0just stories now. Having an opportunity to find a therapist, I don\u2019t relive them. They\u2019re stories, they\u2019re part of me, they\u2019re part of my life\u2026and they\u2019ve informed how I wanted to parent, and that\u2019s good thing. And they\u2019ve also informed my ability and desire to be compassionate for people who go through those things. Between my first and second, I had an opportunity to have a much more clear context of what parenting really looks like. And I didn\u2019t have all this idealism and all these beautiful books about how beautiful childbirth and\u00a0pregnancy and motherhood and parenting were supposed to be. Because it\u2019s not magical. It\u2019s really really fucking messy. It\u2019s ugly. It\u2019s sad. \u00a0Its never easy. And that\u2019s normal. And nobody says it.<\/p>\n

Narrator: Thank you Becca, for saying it out loud.<\/p>\n

Special thanks to Baby Blues Connection<\/a> for help with Shh, Don\u2019t Tell! Stories, to Jenny Conlee<\/a>\u00a0of The Decemberists fame for our awesome theme and other music and to cellist\u00a0Collin Oldham<\/a> for his terrific compositions and scoring.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who screams that at their newborn baby?<\/p>\n

Click to listenWhat the f*ck do you want?<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":98,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12,10,9,2,13,11],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/98"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shhdonttellstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}