Vicki Cockerill - NICU MUM Blog

Dear Elijah, Today is Mother’s Day, our third one spent together (fourth if you include when Dad brought me a present when you were still in my tummy). The NICU days seem more distant now, and we seem to be on more of an even keel. This one is also extra special because this is our last just me and you. This time next year we will be celebrating Mother’s Day with your future brother or sister, as a family of four. I have been thinking a lot recently about the last 2 and a half years. So much has changed. You have come so far, and you are frankly amazing. Bloody annoying but amazing all the same. We have spent this week on your first ever holiday and you were the happiest I have ever seen you. We are on the brink of so much change, and I hope you will embrace it. I want you to know it wasn’t because you were not enough, or not good enough because boy are you, and then some. I hope you will know that I will love you just the same when your new sibling gets...

I sat on the bed, Elijah was screaming, after refusing another bottle and being up all night. I stared out of the window with the tears running down my face and came to the crushing realisation, I was a crap mum. I couldn’t do this. I began to regret our decision to even have a baby. I bombarded Greg with messages whilst he was ay work begging him to come home. I couldn’t cope, I didn’t know what to do. He offered to send his sister round to help but the shame of someone seeing me like this, that I had failed tore me up. I pleaded for him to leave it, I would be okay. All you want in the world is for someone to help you, yet the minute that offer is there you cannot possibly take it. Instead you continue to punish yourself. Self-destruction intimate, I carried on barely holding it together for more than a day. I tried to control how I was really feeling by not eating and abusing pills. Our start to motherhood wasn’t the typical kind, and I am unsure if I would have felt like this if...

For those that follow me on social media, will know that last week we overcame a pretty big obstacle. We gave up the dummy. I never really planned on using a dummy but when Elijah was in NICU, he constantly wanted to suck and this gave him comfort so the nurses made him one. I vaguely remember freaking out before Elijah was one because he was waking up about 100 times a night for it. I was very sleep deprived so sought advice from friends how to kick it.   Cold turkey was the favoured option, we lasted 2 hours and a failed nap time before I wanted to chuck myself out of the nursery window. We sacked it off, and I gave in and relented with the excuse of, well he will need this for recovery after the op. We will address it after (that is pretty much the theme for my first year of parenting.) But, then the year crept up on us, and he was sleeping better, he would wake up and put it back in himself, unless he couldn’t find it,  which was normally embedded in his ear for some u...

I have been feeling out of sorts recently. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Is it my 22 week pregnant hormones? Perhaps. Maybe, it is being on the eve of my 27th birthday, who knows. It came to me more when I recently went to spend some time with some old best friends. I felt different, was I different? I think I was. I think I have now come to the realisation that I have changed, I am in a weird sort of limbo where I have gained a new confidence, am interested in new things, have new passions but I am still adapting with how I present the ‘newer version of me’, to the real world. I have been more honest by sharing my life online then I have been in real life. I find it easy to write the words of how I am feeling, to relive what we have been through and most of all to be honest in my writing. This is how I process, how I cope, but face to face? I am still very much the anxious acne ridden teenager who was rejected by her mum. Can we change? There is the old age phrase of a ‘...

Elijah, You’re upstairs asleep, I am downstairs crying. You should be at nursery, but we didn’t even make it out of the house. I couldn’t handle you, the situation, I feel like I have failed you. That I failed as a mother, and not for the first time. There have been times in our crazy two years I have broken down and cried, out of happiness, fear, frustration, you name it, as your mother I have felt it. Even more so as our journey wasn’t so textbook, kiddo. As much as I want to admit you are a normal little boy, with what you have been through in your short life, you are not. Things took their toll on us as parents, but they also left their mark on you too. I know there are a lot of changes going on around you, and some you may not fully understand. In a few months, you will become a big brother, but it is beginning to dawn on me this may be more than you can handle. For a while you have been acting out, getting emotional, we put this down to the terrible twos, bu...