"Happy" Birthday: When the birth was the unhappiest moment of your life

So. This is my first blog. Mostly because I have come to recognize I need to write (or journal as my colleagues would say) about my experience as a way to heal.

As you can tell by the title, this is not going to be a butterflies and daisies type of blog, nor one with comedic relief and little cartoons or memes attached. This is purely all feelings and events.

Around this time, 12:33am one year ago, I was in the triage room at Midstate Medical Center Birthing Unit being monitored to see if my contractions and baby's heart-rate would regulate. Around three hours later, the hospital decided to admit me due to a serious dip in heart-rate. This is where it all began. This is where any plans my husband Mike and I had for our baby and our future started to change in a way we never expected. This is where our 2 month hospital journey begins. This is where our birthing experience became nothing to be happy about.

July 15, 2015 at 8:14am, Matthew Frank McMinn was ripped out of my uterus and forced into this world. Half of a second glimpse was all Mike and I got from behind the curtain (if you can't tell, I had an emergency c-section). If this emergency c-section wasn't traumatic enough, I was unable to see or even hold my son for the first 10 hours of his life. When the doctor came in later that evening to inform us that Matty was having seizures, we were devastated. This wasn't in the books. When Matty was a day old he was transferred to UCONN Health Center's NICU where I had to be away from him for another 3 days. 3 DAYS. Healing from a c-section, all I could think of was how I can't see my son, he doesn't know my scent, and was not yet able to latch. I didn't even feel like a mom. For days I did not feel like I was a mom because I was unable to tend to him, hear him, change his diapers.

Yes, there was an even longer road ahead but that's not the point of this blog so I'm not going there. My point is this:
                         My son's first birthday is supposed to be flooded with happy tears, happy memories, laughs, a lot of photos. But instead it's flooded with sad tears, sad and traumatic memories, no laughs, and almost no photos at all. The handful of photos we do have consist of NG tubes and oxygen machines. My son's birth was nothing to be happy about. So on today, his first birthday, even though I am grateful he is alive (yes there was a time when we didn't think he'd see his first birthday), even though we have planned this HUGE birthday party for him, a ton of bricks came crashing down on me Thursday morning as I remembered these horrifying first few days of his life. And this is something that will never change. I will always become an emotional basket case around his birthday, I will always remember the physical and emotional pain I had to endure, and I will never forget that stupid fucking nurse who so inconsiderately asked me at discharge "O wait! Where's your baby!?".

It really shocked me Thursday when I broke down in my car all because Timehop reminded me of my post: "Officially on maternity leave!" Yea, the worst maternity leave experience ever, Spent entirely in children's hospitals all over New England.

We are throwing Matty a huge party, as mentioned above. 120 people are coming out of a guest list of 165. I know that sounds pretty extreme for a first birthday. But I came to realize today that this party is as much for Mike and me as it is for Matty. We never got the birth excitement, the abundance of balloons and flowers to my delivery room, the herds of people coming in and out to meet and greet our little man into this world. I never noticed that we needed this party so much to feel 'normal'. This party doesn't just symbolize the fight our son has to keep going, it symbolizes the strength we have to keep pushing, the fact that we made it through this year even though we are battered and torn, this party is a way for us to reconnect and create some of the joyous memories we weren't privy to a year ago.  This birthday is supposed to put the "Happy" back in to birthday for us. Even though being a first time mom has proven to be the most traumatic experience of my life, I really do hope that this party is a crucial start to my healing.

Happy First Birthday to the strongest human I have ever met in my life, my amazing son. Mommy loves you more than words can express and she hopes this birthday celebration starts and ends way better than the first time.