I took a little scrapbooking hiatus while I tried to get some other things in order around here. Like my house. Unfortunately, I’m a terrible housekeeper so I gave up on that and just started scrapbooking again. True story, morning glory. I decided not to do a weekly Project Life this year but instead use the kit to put together a scrapbook filled with all of the things I kept from Scarlette’s NICU stay.
A big box in our office was filled with the cute signs that the nurses made to decorate her room and sweet cards from all of y’all and pages of handwritten hematocrit counts and hospital admission bracelets. I haven’t opened it since we came home.
During the almost six months that we spent in the hospital the nurses/doctors/social workers/chaplains spent a lot of time talking to me about processing my emotions and working through my experience and taking care of myself. And I spent a lot of time telling them to stop wasting time talking to me about how I was doing and to take care of my baby. I honestly did not mean to be hateful, my fear for her was just so great that it overwhelmed everything else and I functioned best in information; what are her bili levels, how was that blood gas, did she have any residuals?
It was the same when we came home; put down a feeding tube, take her blood pressure, draw up her medication. My currency was control and I clung to it to stay centered. I so often tell her story that I sometimes forget it is mine too. That this miracle was born out of trauma.
These are the things I haven’t shared, how sometimes I have nightmares that just relive the most horrific of moments like day 29 or sometimes a glowing pregnant girl will name her number of weeks and behind my eyes flashes a memory of my own baby at the same gestation outside of my womb, gray and gasping.
These are the memories I put in the box with tiny diapers and miniature blood pressure cuffs and closed the lid on until one day when I was healed enough to hold them in my hands and turn them into something beautiful.
I wound tiny apnea monitor leads into the shape of the heartbeats they recorded, smoothed out papers wrinkled by tears, re-read cards from friends as I slipped them into slots and started on what might not be my most artistic scrapbook but will be, I think, my favorite. This was hard and this was healing.
(From top left: the first time I was allowed to hold Scarlette a month after she was born, her handprint from the day of her birth, the last sonogram where we found out she was a girl, the badge the got us in and out of the NICU at CHOA, the last photo taken of me pregnant at 23 weeks, my hospital admission bracelet and a monitor lead, Scarlette’s isolette card, another monitor lead & flower from a card made by a friend, birth weight, a card from a sweet friend)
