Shortly after Scarlette was born I joined a little support group for preemie mamas. At the time I didn’t think I needed support per se, I just wanted to ask a million questions of people who had been in my situation before. I wasn’t concerned with sharing my own feelings so much as finding out if anyone else’s preemies had as many bradys in one day as Scarlette did, or how long they spent on TPN, or when their hemoglobin numbers came up on their own so they needed less transfusions.
That is how I survived the first few terrifying months of our NICU stay, drinking in the data and focusing on concrete things like charts and measurements and medical texts. But these women knew that eventually all that raw emotion was going to need to release somewhere and they were there when it unleashed, in round the clock torrents, and they have held my hand on the bad days for the past three years, far past preemie related things and well into life.
I am so grateful for this group.
Once a year we get together for a weekend and this year with the addition of some new (full term!) babies we had sixteen kids between us. It was wild and beautiful and this is one of the things I count among the greatest silver linings to come out of our suffering, the deep and abiding relationships that were born in the midst of my brokenness.
