Bonding

"Our records indicate you are a new mother receiving State Disability Insurance (SDI)benefits for a pregnancy-related disability. After your baby is born and you have recovered from your disability, you may be eligible for up to six weeks of Paid Family Leave (PFL) benefits if you remain off work to bond with your baby."

Does the baby have to be living?

Is mourning considered a disability?

Will I ever recover?

As far as I'm concerned, I'm still a mother. And since the girls were our first living children, I guess that makes me a new mother.

We bond with our daughters. We remember their short lives. We are attached to our memories of them during their 6 days in the NICU. We connect with the feeling of holding them after they were removed from the ventilators. We look at their pictures every day. We visit them every week. And especially today, their two-month birthday, we're forever bound to feelings of loss -- for a future with our daughters that will never be.