u/Zestyclose-Froyo-498

I am totally inexperienced with mosaics, but I am pretty crafty and I do love art. I want to make a backsplash for one of my kitchen walls. The tricky part is I wanted it to be moderately easy to remove once we have to move away. I’m trying to figure out what I would need to adhere the mosaic to so that it would be stable for a few years, but not directly attached to the wall.
I am possibly biting off more than I can chew as this will be my first mosaic, but that is what I tend to do ha ha

Any advice about substrate, where to get affordable tiles,
Grouting and adhesive advice is also welcome! Thanks so much

I’ve been struggling since my son was born five months ago. It is getting better and antidepressants are helping some.
Very long post and this is a traumatic first story so if that is something that you are sensitive to, or if you haven’t given birth yet and are trying to keep your storyline positive please feel free to skip.

I had a perfectly healthy pregnancy and planned to do a home birth with a midwife. I was feeling really good about it had read a lot and studied a lot and really trusted my midwife.
I was 41+6 pregnant and still had not gone into labor so I went in to get a biophysical profile done. Everything looked good and while I was there, my water broke in that very dramatic movie fashion. Feeling excited we went home and in a few hours I was laboring with my contractions less than three minutes apart my midwife came right away, and I labored all day, moving and resting and bouncing on the ball and everything towards the evening I got in a birth pool to help me deal with the pain. My contractions slowed way down after I got in the pool and stayed maybe 5 to 7 minutes apart I was checked and only 6 cm , they stayed slower all night long they began to pick up again early in the morning and my midwife came back, anyways I basically labored all day. Around 4 PM that day she checked me again and I was still pretty much at 6 cm at this point. I was completely exhausted and had been laboring for 40 hours. I turned to her and for the first time felt like this baby was not gonna come out and I really needed help.
We went to the hospital and I got an epidural, after about six hours on the epidural I had only got to 8 cm so they started Pitocin because I had developed an infection a few hours earlier. I didn’t know much about an epidural and nobody told me there was a button I could push to give me more medicine so I was on the epidural for 12 hours and never pushed the button, by the time I was pushing I could feel everything and move my legs pretty well. I genuinely hated the feeling of being numb and stuck in the bed with an epidural but was glad for a break in the pain, I never did sleep though because the meds makes me violently shiver and it was very uncomfortable. Finally It was time to push and I was told suddenly I had one hour to push or they were going to do an emergency C-section because my son’s heart rate was spiking very high with each contraction. I pushed as hard as I could for about an hour and 15 minutes and he was down far enough that they completed his birth with a vacuum, by this point the epidural did help I think but it the vaccum was the most excruciating thing I’ve ever felt, i remember begging them to stop but of course still having to push against feeling myself tearing (ended up being 3rd, borderline 4 th degree tear) They told me that his head was tilted and basically in the wrong position and that is possibly why he was not descending and wasn’t pushing my body hard enough to dilate me.
At first, I thought everything was OK and that we did it because they laid him on my chest, and my husband cut the cord which was sooner than I wanted, but I was too delirious to say anything or care as I was flooded with feel good hormone. I had only held him for a few seconds however when he was taken off of me very quickly and they disappeared and about 30 people flooded into the room it felt like he did not cry, I did not hear him cry for days, and they finally came in and told me he had to be intubated and that he had a condition called HIE which they blamed on the stressful birth and later in the notes, I read that he had a tight new cord, though nobody mentioned that to me when it happened and my midwife who was there watching the birth said it was not present that she saw so I’m wondering if they are covering themselves but I digress.
They had to ship him to a Nicu about an hour away, and I had to stay there overnight to handle my infection. I’ve never felt more hollow and both spiritually and physically empty than when they took him to save his life. I went very silent until I could see him and just wept and when we would leave the Nicu for the night I would weep because I ached for my son. He went through therapeutic hypothermia and was on a large cocktail of drugs. I could not hold him for four days. It was the hardest time of my entire life and I was staying in a hotel seeing him as often as I could while also healing from a third-degree tear, I pushed myself extremely hard in those days with a lot of walking to and from nicu and stubbornly took very little pain meds because I was still holding onto my dream of not having anything in his milk and I pumped as best I could every 2-3 hours but my milk supply was stunted a bit by the combination of Pitocin antibiotics and high stress. The breast-feeding journey is a whole other post. Basically we ended up having to pump for three months and combo feed and now at five months, he doesn’t latch at all.

Basically, the hardest part is I’m dealing with feeling like a failure, it was 52 hours of labor total followed by a week in the Nicu not knowing if my son was going to be permanently disabled. Thankfully, my son is OK and meeting all his milestones though we monitor him closely. I really struggle feeling like if I had stayed home maybe the situation would’ve worked out differently or if I had done something differently maybe he would not have had all of this traumatic stuff happen to him. My midwife made a comment that maybe if I had tried more different positions we could have moved his head. This is contributing to my depression because I feel like if I had been stronger, this would not have happened. It was so odd though because it wasn’t because of the pain that sent me to the hospital, it was this weird feeling of dread and panic that I got. I was so determined to have a home but when I felt that feeling all of that went away and I just knew I needed to go to the hospital, but I’m wondering now if that was just cowardice on my part. I went from wanting the most crunchy natural home birth. I even ordered glass baby bottles stuff like organic cotton and after his birthday, they put them on fentanyl and all of my hopes crumbled.
Obviously, my baby is happy and as healthy as could be hoped now and so I’m extremely grateful but also I am deeply terrified to get pregnant again even though I definitely want more kids. I don’t know if I could handle going through it again. For a long time, I could not even look at my son too long without crying because all I could see was his cold body laying in the nicu, for a while, I had terrible flashbacks and extremely hard time sleeping because every time I close my eyes, I would have a flashback. This has gone away, a few months postpartum.

I’m not really sure why I’m making this post. Just maybe that somebody else could relate or have some advice for me. I am in talk therapy but it’s just not helping that much. I did start an antidepressant and that has helped a little bit where I am very functional, but obviously it has not erased the actual trauma.
Also, my husband was very open to home birth this time but has expressed that he cannot support me having a home birth for my second as he was also traumatized, I understand of course but am also saddened by this.