Sometimes These Things Just Happen
By Karla Filibeck
@karlafilibeckwrites
“There’s nothing I could have done to prevent this,” I repeated after her.
“I want you to practice saying these words aloud until you believe them,” she said.
I stood just inside the doorway of my daughter’s room in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) when a neonatologist stepped in and put her arm around me. I was a brand new mother, and we had the sickest baby on the unit. Despite weekly rotations during what would become our 60-day stay, she was never assigned to our daughter’s care. But she cared. I could tell.
There’s nothing I could have done to prevent this. I turned her words over in my mind after she left. I knew she tried to give me an incredible gift with her words, yet it would be nearly two and a half years before I would fully receive it.
My brain had already begun to review the evidence against me.
***
“Everyone says I’m supposed to talk to my baby, but all that I can come up with to say is ... ‘I’m sorry,’” I told the psychologist through tears. He, my husband, and I were all sitting in the unoccupied room next to my daughter’s NICU room. I sat on the edge of a gold recliner they removed from her room to make more space for medical equipment and staff. My shoulders hunched forward, and I looked down at my feet still swollen from the emergency C-section I had just a few days before. Concern hung in the air like fog, while next door two nurses and a tech moved about quickly and skillfully—they monitored my daughter’s vitals, silenced alarms, communicated with doctors and specialists, drew blood, administered medications and treatments, and anything else it took to save her life.
“Why would you be sorry?” he asked, as he handed me a tissue.
“Well I’m just sorry all this happened ... and ... I feel like it must be my fault.”
“Has anyone suggested this was your fault?”
“Well, no,” I said, “The doctors said ‘sometimes these things just happen.’ Her heart rate dropped during labor, but my OB said it looked like the meconium had been there awhile.” I paused, then added, “She must have been in distress before that.” With tears in my eyes I confessed, “A couple days before I went into labor, I went on a hike.”
“Doctors encourage exercise,” he said, “I can’t imagine anyone would say you committed any type of hiking sin.”
Hiking sin.
Now I had a name for my crime.
***
After spending two months in the NICU, my daughter recovered and we took her home. Each month that passed saw fewer follow-up appointments with specialists, we mastered the art of administering medication to a baby who would not take a bottle, and the fear of a life-threatening medical event subsided. Still, the memory of the hike continued to visit me in a wave of hot shame when I tried to fall asleep at night.
I was 41 weeks pregnant on a Tuesday in January, and nothing I had tried worked to naturally induce labor. Not pineapple. Not spicy food. Not acupuncture. I invited a few women on a hike to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Maybe this hike will finally do it, I thought.
We met at the trailhead and made our way through the forest to a waterfall. It didn’t take long to complete the half-mile trek. I don’t remember much about getting there, but I have a picture of my very pregnant self standing next to the waterfall.
On our way back, I made my way down a muddy but slight incline. My right foot slipped out from underneath me.
“Whoa!” I felt my abdominal muscles contract as I shifted to steady myself. Thankfully, I didn’t fall. I remember seeing one of the other women’s eyes widen. Yikes, that was close, I thought. Be careful, I’m sure she told me.
Sometimes the memory of the hike—and specifically the slip—came randomly, like when I was washing a plastic toddler plate or driving to meet friends for a playdate. Other times the anniversary of our NICU stay, a conversation, or a photo triggered the memory. Remembering the hike itself wasn’t traumatic, per se, but the prosecution in my mind felt unrelenting and cruel.
How could I have been so selfish? So irresponsible? I should have known better than to go hiking that day.
I could have slipped in the shower any day, I reply. But my defense was weak. I lacked confidence in my rebuttal because deep down I suspected I would have found a way to blame myself in a thousand different scenarios.
Well that would have been an accident, I argue back. You chose to go on a hike, and look at all the suffering it caused her.
The downward spiral of self-blame felt like a trial that never ended. I played the role of prosecutor, defendant, and perhaps victim all at once. My thoughts became a perpetual review of the evidence against me. Where was the judge to strike the gavel and say ‘Enough!’?
Sometimes my husband would hear me crying in bed at night, and he’d plead with me, “Babe, the doctors said it wasn’t your fault. You’ve got to let this go.”
But I couldn’t let it go.
***
My daughter was 20 months old when I joined the Exhale community and started to write. A few weeks in, I came across a lesson on vulnerability, which included the following prompt:
What keeps you up at night? What are the nagging, gnawing worries on your mind? Write them down—list them out and elaborate on them.
I wrote and wrote and wrote. I filled pages with words I felt too scared and ashamed to share with anyone. I described the torment neither my husband nor my therapist had understood. And through my writing, I discovered something I hadn’t understood yet either. Underneath my shame, I discovered a fear that one day my daughter would learn about the hike—and she would blame me, too.
How could I honestly tell her what the doctors had told me—that sometimes these things just happen—when I myself remained unconvinced? And if I didn’t tell her it was my fault, what if someone else did? I desperately wanted to protect her from the story I was telling myself about her birth.
Not long after I started writing, I started to see a new therapist. In our first session, I told her the whole story from beginning to end. I told her about the hike and the slip. I told her about the shame. And I told her how scared I was that my daughter would grow up to blame me for all that happened. Using a combination of talk therapy and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, we made some progress towards releasing some of the shame I felt when I recalled the memory.
“How do you feel about your own birth?” she asked me in session one day.
“I’ve never really thought much about it,” I said, “I guess it doesn’t really make much difference to me how I came into the world.”
“How do you think your mom feels about your birth?” she asked. I paused to consider her question, an intervention. As a firstborn, my birth made my mom a mother. I figured it was probably one of the most memorable days of her life, yet I rarely thought much about it except for the date—my birthday. It never occurred to me that my daughter might not care about the details of her birth—or at least not as much as I did.
***
“Well there’s definitely a baby in there!” my new OB says.
Thwump. Thwump. Thwump.
“The heart rate is right around 180, which is perfect.”
I am relieved to hear a heartbeat. I am also relieved there is only one. I am convinced twins would be a guaranteed NICU stay, given my small frame.
My NICU baby, almost 2 ½ now, sits in a chair on my right watching family videos on my phone. My husband sits on the floor, his back against the wall in sight of the ultrasound screen. My OB finishes the ultrasound, and I sit up. The paper drape covers my bottom half, but I still feel exposed.
I wipe the jelly off of my stomach and turn to the doctor. “Thank you for the referral for counseling,” I say. “I’ve been seeing the counselor you recommended every two weeks, so I’ll have her support through this pregnancy.” I take a deep breath before I continue.
“For some reason my brain has fixated on something I did during my pregnancy that could have caused all that happened with my daughter.” She immediately starts to shake her head ‘no.’
“You would have had to have done cocaine or meth that day for it to have been your fault, and I know you didn’t do that,” she says. “It was the placenta.”
“Well I went on a short hike a couple days before she was born,” I continue, “and the trail was muddier than I expected. My foot slipped. I didn’t fall, but I felt my muscles contract to catch myself.”
“There would have had to have been a major blow to your belly,” she tells me. “There would have been blood. The doctors would have known. If anything, the hike was good for your placenta.”
Good? The hike had been a good thing?
My eyes fill with tears. My chin quivers. “Thank you for saying that. I mean, I know you’re not just saying it for me, but thank you.”
She tells me that she had a similar delivery just last week. The baby’s heart rate dropped during labor, and she didn’t feel comfortable with it. So she called for a C-section, and they found the baby swimming in thick meconium. The baby was doing well in the NICU, breathing on its own one week later.
Sometimes these things just happen.
Familiar words from my past echo in my mind, and this time they ring true.
I pull the waistband of my skirt back up over my belly and reach down to slip my shoes back on. We gather our things to leave. My daughter takes my hand, and we begin to walk down the hall. I look up at my husband and ask, “Did you hear what the doctor said?” He nods, puts an arm around me, and pulls me in. My shoulders relax, and I smile. I walk through the door a free woman, knowing I would one day tell my daughter with full confidence:
“Sometimes these things just happen. You were so sick, and it was so hard to see you that way. I blamed myself for a long time for what you went through, but you are more than your birth. And so am I.”
Guest essay written by Karla Filibeck. Karla is a wife, mother of two, and writer living in Kailua, Hawaii. While she grew up in Minnesota, she has spent most of her adult life on Oahu. Karla worked in public health for 8 years before deciding to stay home to mother and to write. In her free time she enjoys walking the beach, hiking with friends, and indulging in local, craft dark chocolate. You can read more of Karla’s writing on Instagram.