When moms need care

How caring for moms in the NICU taught me everything I know

Back before my life became consumed by the gender wars, I was a NICU nurse.  It was an amazing job, which I'm grateful to have had the honor to perform for 28 years.  Today, I was thinking about the moms. 

They would come, and they would sit.  They would stay for hours, for days, for weeks.  They were exhausted. They were worried.  They were grieving, grieving the loss of the birth and the beginning of motherhood that they had planned and hoped for.  They had envisioned a celebration, earned through the doorway of labor pains.  They had planned the nursery, had a baby shower.  And now here they were, visitors in a sterile environment, being told what they were and were not allowed to do, while others cared for their precious babies.  

I remember their pale, anxious faces.   They were plainly in need of rest.  I worried about their blood pressure.  I knew they didn't take enough pain medication, 24 hours after a major abdominal surgery.   I worried about their bleeding.   Sometimes they would get incisional infections. They would hemorrhage.  Their incisions would open up.  They didn't get the rest or the healing they plainly needed.  They blamed themselves for the fact that their baby was sick. Sometimes they were on their last emotional nerve, and as the most convenient and safest target, I would end up on the receiving end.  I would tell them that I thought they should go home, and get some rest.   This never worked.  They would stay.  It seemed that would stay until they passed out.  

What I quickly learned was that moms don't go home until they know their baby is safe.  They just don't.   They were unable to even see how exhausted they were.  All they could see was that baby.  So I would teach them.  I would teach them to get the baby out of the isolette.  I would place that baby, naked except for a diaper and maybe a tiny little hat, directly on her bare chest.  We would talk about each wire.  Each line on the monitor.  We would talk about the schedule and what to expect next.  We would talk about how to read his signals, how to get the most breast milk with the least amount of effort.  I would tell them what I saw, what the temperature and the respiratory rate meant, and how they were related.  And then I woukd ask her how she was doing. Was she sleeping?  Was she taking her pain pills?  Did she understand that it was OK, really more than ok, to take them?  We would put the baby back, tucking him in on his little tummy with body pillows I would make from little rolls of cloth.  The lines on the monitor would go smooth,  regular.   We would turn the oxygen down a little. I would tell her we had three more hours before we needed to do anything.  I would call her if anything changed. Pinky promise.  I wasn't going anywhere, and I was an expert. 

That was when she would tell me, sometimes through tears, thank you.  Maybe she would go home for a while. She was awfully tired, after all. 

Why am I telling this story?  Because for two years, I've been living a life of an exhausted mom who can't go home and sleep. There is no one to take care of my babies. No one to reassure me.  I had dreams. Dreams that they would be happy and whole.  Dreams that I would always love them, and they would always know it.  And now there is grief, with no end that I can find.  It's exhausting and all consuming, but I can't stop.  

And what is worse is that there are so many other moms out there in exactly the same place.  Their kids are suffering.  They can't fix it.  They forget to take care of themselves. It's been years since they've smiled.  This pain stays on their backs, a heavy burden they haven't put down for so long they can't even imagine what it would be like not to carry it.  No one can carry it for them. And most of the time, there's very little understanding or caring or support.  These moms are asked to carry more than any human should have to.  What do they need?  

They need you. They need you to speak up for their children. They need leaders, to stand up and say, enough allready.  Let's stop hurting kids, acting like we don't know that puberty blockers and chest binders and wrong sex hormones are not actually going to help them.  Let's stop telling kids that their parents are bigots and transphobes.  

I can't tell you what you can do. Please pray about it.  Think deeply about it.  Let's stop.