When it wasn't what you expected
If your baby is in the NICU, or did not come home
Everything written for new parents assumes a healthy baby asleep upstairs. This is for the people that assumption leaves out.
4 min read
Almost everything written for new parents — including most of this website — quietly assumes a baby who came home. If that is not your situation, that assumption has probably been landing on you all week, in leaflets and greetings cards and well-meant questions.
This page does not assume it.
If your baby is in intensive care
NICU parents have strikingly high rates of post-traumatic stress — one study of parents whose infants were in the NICU found close to 60% developed PTSD. Mothers tend to show it while they are still on the unit. Fathers often show it around four months after the baby comes home, when everyone else has decided it is over.
- The hypervigilance is not irrational. You have been trained by weeks of alarms to expect the next one.
- Feeling like a visitor to your own child is one of the most commonly described experiences, and one of the most painful. It is not evidence that you have failed to bond.
- Guilt about wanting to leave the unit, or about being relieved when you do, is close to universal and says nothing about your love.
- Coming home can be harder than the NICU, not easier. The structure goes, the monitoring goes, and it is suddenly all yours.
Hand to Hold
Hand to Hold is a US non-profit built specifically for NICU families — free support groups, counselling, bereavement support and peer mentors who have been on a unit themselves. If you take one thing from this page, take that name.
If your baby died
There is nothing on this page that will help with that, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What we can do is be accurate about two things.
The first is that your body is still postpartum. You can have postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, postpartum psychosis and every physical warning sign on our body page, and grief can hide all of them. Milk still comes in. Hormones still fall off the cliff. Please do not let anyone, including yourself, file everything under grief and stop looking.
The second is that the people who do this well are specific, and they are not your GP by default.
- Postpartum Support International has a dedicated loss and grief programme, with free groups for pregnancy and infant loss.
- Star Legacy Foundation runs free phone support and free online groups for stillbirth and infant loss, including groups for pregnancy after loss.
- Return to Zero: HOPE runs free online support groups, including groups for fathers and non-birthing parents, and for people of colour.
About the rest of this site
The reflection tool, the grounding exercises and the crisis lines all still apply to you, and the crisis lines will not flinch. Some of the other language here — the articles about bonding, the community copy — is written for a baby who is at home. We know it may not fit. We would rather tell you that than have it catch you off guard.
You do not have to be “doing badly enough” to use any of these. Grief and depression are not the same thing, they frequently travel together, and telling them apart is not your job to do alone at 3am.
Where this comes from
HoldMama is a support and education resource. It does not provide medical diagnosis, treatment, or emergency services, and nothing here replaces care from a qualified clinician. If you are in crisis, call 988 or your local emergency number.