It's NICU awareness month.
Due to our experience with the NICU, my social media has a lot of NICU resources and stories scattered throughout. Even nineteen months into parenthood, I still follow several accounts related to NICU life and find value or community in their content.
Something that is often shared on these accounts is how normal and okay it is for one's NICU experience to weigh heavy no matter how long it's been. For me, every once in a while, I'll have a moment of bad memories or feelings of losing out on a "typical" newborn experience. Or perhaps I'll notice that a current anxiety is linked back to the rough days of having a tiny preemie at home and always feeling like we were on the brink of failure because he was just so small with teeny person needs and we were so incredibly worn out already.
These accounts also share that there is no "just" in the NICU. Meaning there's no story or experience that matters less than another. Every experience is different, every family is affected differently, and the healing happens differently for everyone.
Both of these common themes have always resonated with me and I usually find value in the reminders.
This NICU awareness month, though, I am making a point to try to find value in the one reminder that I have always had the most trouble with. And that is the reminder that behind every NICU baby is a professional care team doing their best.
So many times I have read on various NICU focused social media accounts that people loved their NICU nurses, became friends with them, are still in contact with them, are so grateful for them....
Oh boy.
It's awkward to say out loud "I resent the people who took care of my baby in the NICU".
That sounds real bad, doesn't it? Like, wow, ungrateful much?
Yup. I'm here right now to own my salty bitch attitude. No one ever talks about it, but I cannot possibly be the only NICU mom who struggles to "love" her NICU team and the experiences she had with them.
Here's the thing:
Things were not perfect. There were mistakes made, communication that fell apart, and moments of pure rage over either the treatment of myself, my husband, or Arthur.
Those moments stand out much, much louder to me in memory and weigh much, much more than the positives. And I think that's a really common occurrence after a traumatic experience but doesn't get talked about because it's really unpleasant. We like to search for the positives. We like to tell people to just shift their perspective and they'll feel better. This isn't bad advice, it's just often not accessible when you're hurting and are desperate to be heard. And unfortunately, it's hard to find someone to hear it when it's something as...unsavory...as feeling white hot rage when you look back on memories of your NICU team.
Negative interactions in times of hardship are so potent, they pile on and stick out like the sorest of thumbs because your whole self is already on high alert, hyper aware of stressors. I think, for me, when another negative interaction would happen in the NICU, I often felt like yelling "REALLY? NOW? OF ALL TIMES???"
But I didn't.
The negatives quickly turned into resentment. I decided all I could do was tolerate the care team, be polite, and go through the paces of communicating with them as little as possible beyond detailed information about Arthur's day. I knew Arthur would get what he needed, but I never trusted that I would get what *I* needed from his care team because I had experienced those "REALLY???" moments that completely disillusioned me.
I also wasn't in a place to communicate in the moment to the team when I had experienced a hurt. I was in survival mode, taking the hits and soldiering on to show up every day. I was completely incapable of being vulnerable with anyone except my closest support people and even then that was hard. I wasn't processing hurts because there was no space to. Crisis is not a time when good processing happens. So instead, the hurts piled up and the resentment built and by the time Arthur was ready to go home I couldn't fathom even sending a thank you card because I was so full of bottled rage.
I had been keeping score of the hurts all along, but my heart was a really unfair scorekeeper. It overlooked every positive "win" for the care team and said "Yeah, but THIS happened yesterday and I can't BELIEVE it, so screw them!"
My distrust was deep. I lowered and lowered and lowered my expectations to shield myself from being disappointed again. And all the while, I was blocking any path in for something good to happen (and for me to notice it) because that felt impossibly vulnerable in a time of deep protectiveness.
This NICU Awareness Month for me is about digging real deep, sifting through the hurts, and trying to untangle the resentment to find those positives that I couldn't acknowledge at the time.
It's already proving to be a hard task as I try to highlight a positive and my mind LEAPS into protective mode to say "Yeah, BUT" every single time. Even though we are no longer in the NICU. Even though no one is in crisis anymore. Even though it's almost been two years. That's birth trauma, my friends.
I'm making two commitments that I think are going to help me in this process.
1. Before the end of this month, I will have written a letter and sent it to the nurse manager of the NICU where I experienced one particular hurt that stings the most. Being heard matters, because sometimes the people who are supposed to be helping have no idea that one of their actions is extremely unhelpful until someone tells them. Also, being heard matters because it can greatly reduce the weight of bottled up emotions, like letting someone else take a piece of the overwhelming load, box it up, and put it away for you.
2. I will specifically make time to think on, process, and write down both the negatives AND positives of our experience to get them out of the swirling ether of my brain and into the open where I can see for my own self that there is a path to gratefulness for the NICU team hiding somewhere in our story just out of my sight.
Anyway. That's it. That's the plan.
Sometimes I wonder what in the world some people must think of me when I share a really ugly truth on these blog posts. But then I remember that the whole point of this blog is just to share what's actually going on in my head and that if I sugar coat anything to appear more agreeable or likeable or virtuous, that goes directly against the goal of embracing being genuine and honest. And attempting to appear perfect is much worse than simply appearing human, no matter how much someone may dislike it.