Love, Sarah

 “Dear NICU Mama, You can be so grateful for the support you receive and still grieve the experience. The support you receive can be such a blessing even if only from this community or the staff at your NICU who may become like family to you. You may be grateful for the kind words of those supporting you, the way the NICU team watches over your child, and their tender care and quick action. You may smile or laugh for the first time since entering the NICU because of the staff or an interaction they have with your child; it’s hard to keep a straight face with projectile poop all over your child’s nurse.

Though you may be grateful, you may also grieve the loss of an opportunity to know your baby on your terms. Maybe you never got to hold them or you’ve only seen their face with tubes, tape, wires, and swelling from all the fluids. The way you started your journey as a mama to your baby is not the way you imagined, and the time you have together may never be what you dreamed. You changed the moment your baby was rolled through those doors, and it’s okay to grieve the loss of expectations for what meeting your child would be like and the loss of who you were before the NICU. You may not ever be the same, but you have shown strength and become so much more than you could have imagined.

So be grateful and grieve, be happy, be sad, be angry, and be the one person who is the best mom for your child today, tomorrow, and every day to come.”

Love,
Sarah

More of Sarah+ her son’s NICU Journey:

“My name is Sarah, and in 2018 I delivered my first son quite unexpectedly at 30 weeks and 5 days. When we went to the hospital at 3am for what I thought was food poisoning, we discovered that I was actually fully dilated and having a baby. We were discharged after a 40-day NICU stay to have several months of follow-up appointments and in-home nurse visits. My preemie figured out how to eat very quickly but didn’t really understand that he needed to breathe on his own. I still remember meeting him for the first time when he was 3 hours old, and now he is 3 years old and an older brother.”