Excerpt
Stronger in the Difficult Places
Chapter 1What’s Different About Complex Shame?Understanding the Hidden Burden“Your baby is not normal. We need to run more tests,” the doctor said matter-of-factly, with the frigid distance of never having touched our lives. I looked at him blankly as we sat in my private maternity room, me holding my baby between us.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asked.
I did. He was confirming what the little knowing voice had been telling me all day. I couldn’t answer, because my brain was trying to wade through a raging river of thought:
It’s payback time. You knew this was coming, Zoe.“Your baby is not normal. Do you hear me?” It sounded as if he were speaking through a long tunnel. Slowly and loudly, his words echoed in my head:
Your baby is not normal.“What are you looking for in these tests?” I managed to ask him. But I didn’t really want to know. I wanted to go back three days to my daughter’s birth, when she seemed perfect. Yet I desperately needed to know so I could stop hoping and dreading. Instead, I sat quietly and listened to the doctor telling me he needed to keep on searching.
“I need to take her to the neonatal intensive care unit. A nurse will let you know when she’s ready, and you can join her shortly.” He reached for my baby, and I handed her over, feeling trapped in a scene that was quickly unfolding before I could get a good grip on the moving ground.
Shortly after he left with my baby, the nurse came and escorted me to the NICU, a jungle of white cords, constant beeps, low hisses, and mysterious rumbles. This place where they sent babies who were sick or dying was just steps down the hall from rooms full of celebrations of new life—plump, rosy, and healthy babies. Here in the NICU, time was marked by feedings and shift changes. The NICU wasn’t included on the maternity tour for expectant parents—nor was the chapel, the geneticist, or the morgue. But I was learning this was where babies went sometimes.
They had discharged me from the hospital, so now I was simply a visitor who didn’t want to leave. When they kicked me out of the NICU for their shift change, I waited in the small lobby where family and friends could observe the fragile babies behind a double-paned glass window. The glass still wasn’t thick enough to block out the nurses’ and doctor’s words. I closed the blinds that were protected between the panes so they couldn’t see me and leaned my cheek against the frigid window, listening to their concerned murmurs.
“She’s the worst case of low tone I’ve ever seen.”
“Did you notice she doesn’t even have a gag reflex?”
“They’re doing a scan on her brain tomorrow. They’re not sure there’s much activity.”
“Looks like she’s going to be a vegetable.”
I stood frozen, scolding myself for eavesdropping. I knew I should walk away and mind my own business, but they were talking about
my business,
my baby. They wouldn’t say these things to my face, so I stayed, riveted to the window.
“I wish the mom would go. She was here all night last night, and I couldn’t even read my book.”
“She asked me to play classical music, and I swear I barely made it through the night!”
“Why doesn’t she leave? Who’s staying with her kids at home?”
“Did you know she’s a therapist? She’s probably crazy.”
They laughed.
They couldn’t understand why I didn’t go home to rest or why I insisted on staying at my daughter’s side. But I knew. I wasn’t leaving another baby at the hospital.
I envied the parents who could go home and live lives and come back and visit their sick babies. But maybe, I reasoned, their pain was different. After all,
their babies weren’t here because the parent had committed an offense against motherhood like I felt I had.
The NICU was full of babies who never got visited. I ached for these babies as I thought about my first, my Kaiya, the one I’d left in the hospital so many years ago when I was a bewildered high school girl. I walked away and didn’t come back.
Where is she? I wondered. It had been a closed adoption. Except for a few details in non-identifying letters from her parents, I knew nothing about her.
This time would be different. My second daughter—Sullivan, we had named her—would feel my loyalty and know I was a good mom who would never leave her.
My breasts were full. They had been down this road before—three times—with my first daughter and then ten years later with my first son, then again when my second son came along. They knew exactly what to do. The nurse gave me a breast pump and milk containers and led me to a little storage closet where I could pump the yellow-gold liquid that would sustain my daughter. As I pumped, my tears flowed faster than my milk. Then I felt the familiar tingling and the letdown. My shoulders relaxed against the hard chair. Now tears and milk flowed at the same pace. I reached down for my thermos of water and looked around the closet at the medical equipment arranged on the shelves, wondering where my husband, Stan, was.
I finished pumping and exited the closet, containers of milk in hand. At least it was something I could do. I felt exhausted. My therapist brain took a quick inventory of my internal state and quietly told me,
Zoe, you’re grieving.No, I’m not grieving; I’m seething and dying. I’d allowed myself to think I would finally have a healthy girl.
A more sinister voice inside me kept saying,
You don’t get to give your child away and then get a second chance. This isn’t grief.But my therapist self whispered,
Yes, it is.When I returned to the NICU, I leaned into the incubator and picked up my mini-me, careful not to pull or tangle the cords attached to different parts of her little body. Holding my four-pound baby, I felt her warmth against my skin and the contrasting coldness of the tubes. I looked at her and wished desperately that I could put her back inside my body. There she had been safe and perfect. There she had received all the sustenance she needed from the perfect tube that connected her life to mine, not from a man-made tube in her nose.
She never cried and she couldn’t suck. Her little body didn’t work, but she looked at me with clear dark eyes. She saw me and I saw her. She couldn’t be brain dead. Her brain was working, even if it worked differently from everyone else’s. Her expression told me she was going to be all right. My heart swelled with love, and my mama instinct surged to protect this little one that the world didn’t understand.
I understood. My shame told me that we would be punished together.
Coming to Grips with ShameIt took me years to reckon with my past and understand the grip that shame had on me—and even longer to finally rewrite the narrative of my life. In the chapters to come, I’ll share more of my journey of healing in the hope that it helps you overcome whatever false shame story is holding you down.
For me, losing my first daughter, the baby I placed for adoption thirty-three years ago when I was sixteen years old, together with having the health stripped away from my second daughter, Sulli, eighteen years ago, proved to be the collision point of my shame and fear. The woman I was at Sulli’s birth may be much like you today. Back then, I was fighting to suppress the volcano, dormant for years, that was finally erupting. Now I know that anything we suppress will eventually emerge and often at the most inopportune time.
Even though I was (and still am) a therapist daily working to help people overcome shame’s stranglehold on their lives, I hadn’t figured out how to have a healthy conversation with my own shame or even acknowledge that it was dominating my emotional and relational existence. I was blaming myself for choices and circumstances I had little control over. Like most of us do with shame, I was trying to hide my trunk of secrets from the world. Despite my academic knowledge and clinical experience, I continued to walk the world in a shame-filled way for years, convinced my shame was well deserved. It was so familiar I rarely noticed its existence.
Early in my journey, I was convinced my placing my first daughter for adoption was the reason my second daughter was born with extensive health issues. Surely I didn’t deserve to have another healthy daughter. Many of my clients carried shame that I could easily recognize as exaggerated, misplaced, and sabotaging.
But me? I thought.
Mine is well deserved, right?I wasn’t battling the simple kind of shame I had read about in my academic and self-help books. Mine didn’t seem the kind of shame that Brené Brown, renowned researcher and author on vulnerability, says can be remedied with empathy. I didn’t think I was battling toxic shame, either, the kind that can fill someone with intense self-loathing. My shame was deep rooted and insidious but not completely debilitating. I could function at a high level academically and relationally, but I couldn’t rid myself of the sense of inevitable doom that I felt I deserved.
