midnight snack

This week has been hard. I've been right back there. 

I think lots of things have contributed, partly because Skittle turned 6 months and I've been thinking '6 months ago this...6 months ago that'. I've seen my sweet friend everyday this week and watched her with her newborn and internally compared everything about her experience with ours. 

I was holding it together until she asked me to hold her little one while she nipped to the loo, cuddling a fresh 4 day old in my living room was just too much for me to handle. I felt a strange mixture of bitter, disappointed, angry and emotional I wanted to sob, sob hard and curl up under the covers but then numbness set in and I only squeezed out a couple of tears. So I self-harmed a little instead. I'm embarrassed. I've got to chill out. 

Sleep evaded me the night before last, nightmares swirled around my mind and every fear played out in scenes I couldn't control. 

I remember night times when I was still an inpatient upstairs and along the corridor from my tiny Skittle. I would ask for a porter to come and wheel me down to NICU and my worn out, morphine pumped body would lean on the side of the incubator and I'd stroke his little leg for a few minutes. 

I loved my night time visits. I don't know why they felt so special. It was always really quiet, no other visitors would be around, just a few silent nurses bustling from baby to baby. I think it's because it was the closest to just me and him I could get. My midnight snack of mothering. 

I'd deliver a bottle of expressed milk and check his charts to see how he'd been doing over night. A few times the nurses would send me back to the ward because I didn't look like I was in a fit state to be out of bed. It was so sad when that happened. But as my stay progressed I got a little stronger and could shuffle the journey myself. 

My favourite thing was looking at his diddy foot that he insisted on poking out the end of his blanket and resting on his nest. So cute.

Now when I wake up I can see a cute little face with no CPAP and I can hear his sweet little breaths and stroke his head. And now that he's started chatting I start my day with this...

...morning Skittle!