Love, Geneva

“Dear NICU Mama, When you feel alone, please remember while this journey can be isolating and scary, you are the best parent for your baby, their heart is yours, and yours beats theirs. It surrounded them in love and safety for as long as you carried them inside you. Your baby won’t know what alone feels like because you’ve given them the best gift you ever could: a mama who loves them immensely, who never gives up on them.

Perhaps you feel that your body failed your baby, but your heart and dedication never will. Maybe you can’t always be physically present with your baby, or maybe you’re the only person who can be there. Maybe your baby won’t be returning home or it’s months away, or maybe your baby spent a few days in the NICU; it is okay to feel isolated in your experience. But here’s the thing, dear mama: you are not alone.

Whether your baby will be going home with you physically or as an angel, they are yours, a piece to your heart’s puzzle only a mama can understand and know. So, while you may feel alone, you never are. You carry pieces of them (literally – their fetal cells remain in your blood, bone marrow, and other tissues) with you everywhere you go. They are a part of you, and you them. You are teammates and soulmates, being brave together, alongside every other NICU Mama, feeling many of those same solitary and intimidating feelings.

As I sit here and write this to you, my former NICU baby is in my arms, her sleepy head resting on my shoulder. I still feel that she is physically a part of me, I'm not sure that will ever change, and that is okay. She’s like a weighted blanket on my chest, soothing my heart, calming my anxieties and instead slowly replacing them with healing and hope.

Mamas, we are never alone, we will always carry our babies with us, and we have each other, wearing our NICU mama badges proudly and bravely, standing side by side, and heart to heart.”

Love,
Geneva

More of Geneva + Whitney’s NICU Journey:

“Whitney was born at 35 weeks due to a placental abruption. I had been hospitalized 6 weeks prior, at 29 weeks, because I started bleeding. My placenta bled consistently for those 6 weeks, as I remained on bedrest in the hospital, however Whitney also continued to remain stable, so we were able to safely push my pregnancy from 29 to 35 weeks. On the day of our scheduled C-section at 35 weeks exactly, my OBGYN said this was the absolute best case scenario for this situation. We’d allowed Whitney to grow more, and also avoided life threatening complications for both of us. Yet, I still feel like I failed her. She needed more time inside my belly and I couldn’t give that to her. She stayed in the NICU for 9 days. We had a few hiccups and setbacks, as I would guess a lot of us NICU mamas have experienced. About 20 minutes after she was delivered, she was whisked away due to respiratory distress. I won’t ever forget the look on my husband’s face as he quickly battled which one of us to stay with. I told him to go with her, she needed him more than I did. My husband had already been pulled in many directions for the previous 6 weeks as he’d been caring for our toddler son solo, and trying to meet my needs, work demands and our other household needs simultaneously. He seemed to break a little more when he walked away from me to follow our daughter to the NICU. Just as my body had been invaded to deliver her, Whitney’s body was invaded to keep her alive. My husband watched as she had multiple attempts to get an IV in, her fresh soft skin immediately marred, a feeding tube, CPAP and so many little stickers on her skin. At one point during her stay, she got a pressure injury from the dressing holding her IV in place. She still has a scar there that reminds me daily of what she had to endure at less than an hour old. I don’t know that I’ll ever not feel guilty for not being able to keep her safe and protected longer, or be able to let go of the grief associated with missing the birth and recovery I had hoped for, and for not being there for my son and husband in the ways I am most often able to. I am beyond grateful that we are both healthy and alive, at any point after I started bleeding, it could have gone horribly wrong. I also wish it didn’t have to go the way it did. I am learning to process the trauma and grief of our experience, and hold space for it in a world that often asks us to go go go. I sit with the feelings as I hold Whitney, now 5 months old, happy and healthy, snuggled close to my chest, equally honored and in awe that she’s healthy and ours, and saddened by the experiences that brought her into this world. Healing is hard work NICU Mamas, you are not alone.”