My husband pushed me back down onto the bed when I tried to get up to feed our son. Day three. I was leaking and stitched, and I wanted my baby, and his mother was holding him in the chair by the window and had been for forty minutes. He put his hand flat on my chest. “You’re being dramatic. Let her have him.” I lay there and looked at the ceiling and did not make a sound, because his whole family was in that room.
The nurse came in to check my bleeding and asked everyone to clear out. Then she shut the door, sat down on the edge of the bed, and asked me one question: “Did he just stop you from getting to your baby?” I started to say no because I was afraid of what would happen if I said yes. She waited. Then she told me she had seen his hand on me and had already documented it before she came into the room.
She asked me whether his mother had been holding the baby by my permission. I said no. She nodded and told me she’d noticed something else during the previous two days. Every time I asked for my son, someone from his family would find a reason to keep him a little longer. She said the notes showed that I’d repeatedly asked to hold and feed him, but the requests had been dismissed as me being tired or emotional. Then she asked me if I wanted her to bring the hospital social worker in.
I said yes. The social worker came in and closed the door behind her. She told me the hospital had a record of three separate incidents involving my husband or his family preventing me from having my baby, and that what had just happened changed how they were handling the situation. Then she handed me a form and said there was something my husband had signed when we arrived at the hospital. It wasn’t a consent form for his mother to hold the baby. It was a request that no one besides him and his mother be allowed to take our son from the nursery without his permission.
