Kadiera's Playground Cute but Evil - it averages out

I'm having a rough week. I'm sure some portion of the rest of this post can be attributed to stress, depression, and the like. But it is what's in my head, spilled out here in an attempt to stop obsessing over some of this. So y'all can just cope.

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In case I haven't mentioned it, the NICU is damn depressing. And I'm pretty well tied to it and the breast pump - have been for three months now, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Most of our friends and family avoid going to visit Alexander with us - and I can only assume it's so they don't have to face the NICU, because it's not like Alex is all that scary. And to some extent that's really hard for me. I'd rather have the company when we're there to take my mind off things.

Actually, lately it seems like people avoid us in general. I've had a couple friends say, "oh, we should do something," but they never call. At least one of them was scared off by the fact that I'm pumping every three hours, because she just can't plan anything in advance because it's too much work. Some people said they'd be here for us, do anything we needed done, but they don't even have time to catch up over dinner.

Part of me thinks it may just be that this has gone on too long, and people don't know what to make of it. Part of me wonders if it's something I've said or done (or not done...does it really boil down to the fact that I haven't called people incessantly to ask for help, so everyone thinks we're fine?)

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I resent the fact that I can't make plans or have a life. Not that I had much of a life before...but this is beyond the lack of a life that I had when we were doing fertility treatments and trying to time sex and doctors visits and worrying about scheduling events too far out in case things did work. This is that my life exists in 3 hour increments, and includes daily (or nearly daily) visits to the hospital, which take up a couple hours no matter how we try to make them shorter.

There was a concert this past week that I wanted to go to. When tickets first went on sale I passed them up since it was so close to the due date and I figured we'd either be at the hospital or just home from the hospital. When Alex was born, I thought, "we could get tickets," but I didn't because they said most babies came home around their due date. By the time it was clear that he wasn't coming home any time soon, I realized that I couldn't manage a concert on a work night, because I'm just too damn tired all the time.

Our friends are out doing stuff, and avoiding us, and we're sitting in Alex's room, listening to the monitors beeping. What kind of life is this?

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Maybe it's just me - maybe I'm just irretrievably lost and broken and unwanted and unworthy. My therapist was confused by the fact that Alex getting formula this week wasn't an issue per se, just a symptom of the fact that it feels like this will never end. Seriously, we went from them telling us not to bring any more milk because we had too much in their freezer to a frantic phone call that said they didn't have enough milk to get through until we came in that day.

But at least my therapist has the ability to admit that it's not typical (but is still just fine and reasonably normal once she understood my reasoning), and to ask me how many people I know who really *get* me - certainly not most of the people I work with, not most of my family. I can probably count the number on both hands. And, as she points out, not really having much of a peer group makes people depressed.

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I feel like we're missing out on Alexander's entire childhood. And while that's technically not true, because he'll be home eventually and this is just a tiny portion of that thing called childhood.....it's *literally* true, because right now it's his entire life.

Buying baby stuff is supposed to be fun...and most of the time it is, until I get it home and realize that it's all going in storage until he comes home. Looking at it all just makes me more depressed...it's as bad as going to baby showers when we were doing infertility treatments.

Because here's all this *baby* stuff, and we don't *really* have a baby - the hospital has a baby. Hell...the hospital obviously has a baby, since they put their address on all his SSI paperwork to prove that he didn't have money and needed medicaid. We have all this baby stuff that we were supposed to get before he was born, and now we're getting all of it after he was born (all out of order-like), and he's still not here to make use of it, and that sucks.