“Dear NICU Mama, This NICU Awareness Month, I hope you know that your instinct doesn’t need proof to be true.
Seventeen years ago, my son arrived five weeks early, pulled into the world through an emergency C-section that left everything blurred, vague and unclear. Five days later, my mother died. I was learning how to be a mother again and losing mine in the same breath, holding a beginning and an ending in the same two hands. Grief and love do not take turns. They sit together uninvited at the same bedside.
His stay was barely a week, and for a long time I wondered if that made my story small. It didn’t. A single week can hold a lifetime of learning.
I remember moments when I advocated for my son but didn’t feel heard. I didn’t always have the clinical words for what I was seeing or feeling, but I had a mother’s certainty that something wasn’t right. In those moments, not feeling heard made me feel powerless. Unseen. Small in a room full of people trained to care for my son.
You may feel that same powerlessness. You may sit beside the incubator with a feeling you cannot yet name, in a room full of people who know more than you and somehow less. Please know: that feeling is not weakness. It is information.
Your NICU stay may be short or long, loud or blurred by grief you never asked to carry. Either way, I hope you know: you don’t need the right vocabulary to be right. Trust the thing you feel before you can explain it. One day, it may become your voice for someone else too.”
Love,
Inge
