Couple's counseling

10.31.13
   
     I had talked with Kate about dong a couple session for Alex and I. Not that I had anything specific I wanted us to discuss, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't being naive and thinking that everything was just fine with us and there were issues brewing. I had asked Kate what to expect with the couple session, and she kind of shrugged and said, "We'll see what Alex wants to talk about and go from there." No pressure, I liked that.
      Alex and I got there a little bit early because Kate was coming in on one of her off days just to see us. We sat in the lobby, and in came Kate with her bouncing personality. I was really excited for Alex to get to meet her because, obviously, I had talked about her a lot and how much she had been helping me. We followed her upstairs to her office after she hunted through the candy jar in the lobby and pulled out a candy corn sucker for each of us. It was Halloween, after all.

       When we sat down, Kate started us off by saying, "Well Alex, its so nice to finally meet you. How do you think everything is going?" Alex told her that he thought everything was going as well as could be expected, and he talked a little bit about just being a dad and missing Kaitlyn. Kate talked to us about the fact that there were really three different pieces of our grieving: Alex grieving alone, me grieving alone, and our marriage grieving together. There is a statistic that 75-80% of parents who lose a child end up getting divorced. Alex asked why that was, and Kate said that she wasn't really sure, but that statistic is over all marriages that have lost a child, not just stillbirths. Still a scary thought.
      Somehow we got on the subject of that morning and what he remembered about the operating room. Alex said he stood there by my side and watched all of the people in the room- he said there were about 4 people that worked on Kailtyn when she was born. I had no idea that was the case. I didn't remember there being quite that many people in the room- I could only name 5 not including me or Alex. Then he said that he watched one of the people working on Kailtyn do CPR on her... And one of the doctors just looked at the person and shook her head. That just made me start crying. I didn't know they had tried CPR on Kaitlyn, and it just brought up a lot of really confusing emotions. I suppose I'm glad that they tried to do CPR, but at the same time I wanted to protect her from the pain of that. I know, logically, that she wasn't there. She didn't feel any of that, and I know she was gone long before we ever had her with us. But at the same time, I felt like somebody in that room had hope that they could save our daughter. Somebody gave it a last ditch effort to try to revive her for us. I am grateful for that person, even though I don't even remember them being there. And at the same time it hurts me to think that they pushed on my daughter's chest like they would need to for effective CPR. I had taken the infant CPR class at the hospital and I know what kind of pressure and force is needed to make sure you are making the heart pump. It hurts my feelings to think of that. I guess I'm glad they tried, but again its that really weird dualing emotions where part of me is glad and the other side is incredibly sad.
     Alex talked a little bit about how he had been able to compartmentalize everything, and I didn't really know what to think of that. I don't know if compartmentalizing is a blessing or a curse, but I certainly wasn't going to push it. Kate said she is not one of those counselors who forces her clients to relive everything in order to be sure they have talked about it, so if Alex didn't feel the need to talk about it she wasn't going to ask him to. I appreciate her so much for understanding that about my husband. Alex hasn't ever really told me about everything he's seen in Iraq or Afghanistan, and I've never felt like he was bottling everything up. He is just able to put it away in his mind and not go back there.