I feel so dismissed and disregarded. It’s getting to the point to where I don’t even feel like a human anymore I’m 7 weeks postpartum with our rainbow baby..

Let me start by telling you our story of the last year of our life… September 2022 our son passed away at 2 weeks of age to meningitis. The hospital didn’t diagnose him in time before we lost him. We had to take him off life support and spend 6 hours in a room just watching him slowly die after we removed his oxygen tube. This was my second pregnancy but my first with my husband. I had Pre-Eclampsia during my pregnancy with him and it was just terrible. After we lost our son, we just said we weren’t going to actively try but that we were going to leave it in Gods hands. A few months later in January we fell pregnant again with again. This pregnant I felt so much more positive about, I was confident that everything would be ok, I stayed on top of my health and did everything I could to ensure our daughter had zero NICU time. At 35 weeks I was diagnosed with Cholestasis. We had to have an emergency induction at 37 weeks. After we gave birth to her, I hemorrhaged and our daughter had a pulmonary hemorrhage. She almost died.. When I found out; I threatened the hospital that if they let my baby die then they would have a problem out of me. That I couldn’t survive another loss like that. I cracked. A team of psychiatrist was sent to my room after I kept having breakdowns saying she was going to die and how scared I was of them missing something they determined that I was experiencing PTSD and medicated me to where I was calmer. She survived somehow and spent 5 weeks in NICU I spent every day praying and going back to that hospital to see her and kept thinking about all the time I lost with our son a year ago. I didn’t want to make the same mistakes I did before. We have been home for about two weeks and we finally introduced her to my family and his. Ground rules were set out..no kissing, if your sick stay home there’s always next time, if you smoke cigarettes change shirts, always.. always wash your hands before holding her.

My family met her and adored her. They respected all of our rules, I made it clear to them as soon as we arrived. If anyone breaks any of our rules we are snatching her up and leaving. They did good. Today we let his family meet her, only one person washed their hands; no one changed their clothes from smoking, 2 people were sick. One that was sick didn’t hold her and the other was a small child who held our daughter. I was easing into everything and was trying to be easy going hoping my husband would say something after the child kept coughing while holding our daughter. “She did her best to cover it but what more can you expect from a 5 year old” they aren’t as vigilant as adults and I think I really started getting nervous when she coughed through her fingers onto our daughters face at one point. I felt like crying right there in that whole room. I was so scared a million thoughts racing through my head. What if she gets sick again? The doctor told us if she gets sick again it’s right back to the hospital because of her lungs. We lost our son to sickness what if we loose her. All of these thoughts just continued to race through my head. I was so scared to introduce her to everyone before her two month shots but here I was making an effort to be normal again for family. My husband never said a word to anyone. Once we got in the car I tried talking to him about it, he said I should’ve said something but I didn’t feel like it was my place to address his family about our ground rules. I was trying to find a common ground with him because it’s not like these are rules we only set for his family. These rules were set for everyone. He went on a rant and made a comment about how the house is always dirty. But when things are fine and we aren’t arguing the house isn’t an issue. I’ve even told him that I feel bad I’m not able to clean as much as I was before the bag was born but now he’s throwing it in my face. It made me feel really unappreciated. I feel like crying because of how defensive he was over the main issue. I’m scared shitless of loosing another child but is my grief becoming too much of an issue with our current child? Do I need to seek more help? I feel like I’m loosing my mind and my marriage is going to crap. I feel like I’m absolutely worthless at everything. I have no one to talk to about this stuff because if I do then he’s upset with me for sharing our martial issues with people but when we can’t see eye to eye I just never know what to do to move forward and I’m left feeling so degraded and worthless. I love my husband so much but when it comes to the grief of our son and how both of us reacted to our daughters birth trauma we were on two complete ends of the spectrum. I feel so alone..

Also a side note, we’ve been attending grief counseling for the last year to help cope with it but he stopped about 6 months in and I kept going alone.