People here have owned up to various things, including drinking and drug-taking during pregnancy.
Me - I'm a fairly clean-living, straight kind of person, but I still have deep guilt feelings because when I was pregnant with the boys, I was put on salbutamol tablets to stop me going into labour. I had similar problems with easy child 2/difficult child 2 but that was constrolled entirely by a different prostaglandin inhibitor. But the salbutamol dosage I was on when pregnant with difficult child 3 was double the dose of his brother. And difficult child 3's autism is a lot worse than difficult child 1's. I have asked and been told no, it wasn't a factor, but I still wonder and can't help blaming myself.
The doctor I saw for difficult child 3 was not the one I'd had for my first three pregnancies. My first doctor was lovely, kind and very meticulous. The last one was not, and I felt let me down badly in the delivery room (and in other ways during the pregnancy, I worked out later). He contributed significantly to my PTSD.
Something I'm fairly secretive about, is my long-term use of very strong painkillers. They are prescibed via a palliative care centre, a lot of the other patients are terminal cancer patients. I did check, very carefully, that my medication use during pregnancy was not a problem. It's ironic, but the opiates I take actually do less damage to my body than any of the suggested alternatives. I also was able to cut them right back for most of the last pregnancy (there is an autoimmune component to this and the baby's immune system in utero damped down my own immune attack on my body, reducing my pain to the point where I could stop all opiates for six months); I was back on them as soon as difficult child 3 was born.
But in the hospital after difficult child 3 was born, the staff (apart from my specialist) treated me like a drug-seeking addict. My medications were ordered in the charts but te nursing staff would "forget" to get them for me and eventually told me they had "lost the key to the drugs cupboard" which, since we had post-surgery patients on the ward, was a total lie. So I produced my own supply husband brought from home (with prescribed labels). They told me I should hand them over. "Where are you going to store them?" I asked. "You've lost the key to the drugs cupboard."
In the end, I took my own medications but told the nursing staff so they could chart it. It shouldn't have had to happen that way, but my point is - people WILL judge. But you have to make a decision - what is most important here? Your own image, or the help your child needs?
If you are concerned that your child will somehow NOT get the help he needs because of people's judgement about you, then I agree with your reticence. But if you are fairly sure that while people might thinnk badly of you, they will be able to use the information for your son's benefit - then I would put aside any concerns for your own reputation. Besides, people these days are far less judgemental.
In my case, if I tried to explain this sort of detail it either was misunderstood or I was patted on the shoulder and told to stop obsessing about it. Because of my own physical disability, people make erroneous connections betwwen my ptoblems and the kids' problems. They assume my mind is as distorted and damaged as my body and that this explains the kids being "different".
I can't hide my disability. Not past a certain point. So as for disclosure, I haven't got a lot of choice.
What I've done - I developed a sort of shorthand, a way of coping quickly with comments and questions and also a way to quickly inform what has to be informed. "My disability happened some years ago, it resembles MS and has no relevance to difficult child 3's autism. The two conditions are entirely separate. I was not born with this. difficult child 3 was born with his autism."
As far as your choice or otherwise to disclose - you could be ambiguous and say something like, "difficult child's birth mother had the following pregnancy history." You could also ask for this to be kept confidential because difficult child is nnot to be told about this, you want it kept confidential for difficult child's sake. My sister adopted two kids and made the choice to not tell them they were adopted (it was considered an acceptable option back then). She planned to tell the kids when she felt they could handle it, because their beginnings with bio-parents were very rough, they had been fostered to begin with after being abused in infancy.
Where you can, though, use the truth. It is the best option, always. it is your choice how much truth to reveal, ranging from none, to all.
In my case - the only people who know about my opiate use is my medical team and my pharmacist. And immediate family only. Not even all of them. One best friend knows a little. The others know nothing, other than one less-strong medication also on my list. I chose to do it this way because I once confided in someone I thought was a friend, who then when he disagreed with a decision I made, told everyone he knew that of course I would make such a wrong decision because everybody knows that drug addicts are unstable and with the medications I was "hooked on" (which he listed) that my mental imbalance was a foregone conclusion.
I agree, you need to protect yourself from this kind of eventuality.
If you tell someone professionally what they need to know as part of their job, and also make it clear that the information is privileged and not to be shared, then you have grounds for action if it gets out.
Again, to reiterate - your primary concern here is your son. What is in his best interest? How can you ensure his needs are met?
What about asking a doctor's opinion, on whether the value of you divulging this information would outweigh any possible disadvantages? And if they have any ideas on an appropriate, sensitive way to handle this?
I know my experience is not yours. I was using medications because I had no alternatives. If you use substances you now recognise you shouldn't have, and you feel your child is damaged as a result, there are a number of factors here.
First, as parents we often feel far more guilt than we should. Some mothers drink during pregnancy. Some take drugs during pregnancy. Some fathers have been users of various cytotoxic/mutagenic drugs in their earlier days and this has the potential to have lifelong impact.
The thing is - you may have done things like this, or not. Your child's difficult child-ness may be connected to this, or it may not. I've known women who drank to excess during pregnancy (including some who were drinking before they realised they were pregnant). They had normal babies. No Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). I've heard of others who fastidiously avoided all alcohol after they found they were pregnant - but they'd had three or four drinks one night about the time their period was due. And that was enough to do the damage. Or they had rubella during pregnancy and because it's such a mild illness tey didn't realise it until after their deformed baby as born and their rubella titre belatedly measured.
Things can go wrong for all sorts of reasons. Did you change the kitty litter when pregnant? You could have contracted toxoplasmosis which can cause major problems in the baby. Listeria. Gastroenteritis. Anything that gives the pregnant woman a high fever. A choice to continue to take medications because NOT taking the medications would be a bigger problem (as in epilepsy, for example). A pregnant woman with an over-active thyroid.
All these things MIGHT lead to problems in the baby, of varying degrees of severity. Or you could be lucky.
Not every woman who took thalidomide during pregnancy, had a baby with phocomelia.
So tihnk about it. Think about your reasons for not wanting to say anything. Think about how it could be received and if you feel your child could be helped in spite of this. Ask your doctor for advice, then make your decision.
Marg
