The Silver Lining of Being a NICU Mom

NICU baby and mom

I was one of those women who just loved being pregnant and may have actually been glowing. Then my water broke 5 weeks early. Rather, it exploded as it doused the front seat of our car, leaking down to the toes of my boots while my husband and I drove home from our first parenting class. Two hours and an emergency c-section later knocked that glow out of me real quick. I caught only a glimpse of my new daughter as she was whisked away to spend the first three weeks of her life in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

A birth not-at-all according to plan can be expected, but a NICU stay was not remotely part of my own mental preparation for labor or this whole parenting gig. And so I went into the dark, mourning over all the unmet expectations I had for new motherhood. I couldn’t see anything beyond the beeping monitors and the lonely chair where I rocked my tiny baby as she was hooked up to tubes that needed rearranging each time I picked her up. When I came home from the hospital with her still in the NICU, I would walk into her room and stare at the empty crib.

To the Girl in the Belly Bump Photo

Read full story at Her View From Home

I look at the girl in the photo, and yes, I can call her a girl because, gosh even though she was 30, she looks so young. She is smiling and excited and I’m sure she thinks her stomach looks “huge”. She has no idea how huge she will become. Or how her back will ache, her feet will swell, her first birth story will not be at all the way she pictured it or how long it will take her to let that last part go. But right at this moment, in this picture, she looks downright radiant. I can’t believe how much that girl has grown, too.

That was only six years ago and I want to tell her not to sweat all that other stuff, it will all be OK. I want to tell her so much, because six years seems like both a lifetime and a minute ago, as fresh as it is faded. I can’t tell her everything, though, she has to live it to learn it, but if I could just tell her something, I would want to tell her this.

 

Pin this image to save