A Mom of Preemies Learns to Practice Patience

Monday, April 25th, 2011

On New Year’s Eve 2009, still tethered to my IV, I shuffled into the newborn intensive care unit—the “NICU”—for the first time. The front desk was a collage of Christmas cards, all photos of Preemies Past at different ages. Some were toddlers, some were first-graders, some were twelve-year-olds. All were NICU grads.

My twins were born at just 25 weeks, 3 days’ gestation—15 weeks before their due date. Michael George weighed in at 1 lb, 12 ounces and his younger brother, Wagner Lee, weighed 1 lb, 9 ounces. Both were just over a foot long, the size of kittens, not babies. They were in the NICU for three months. Today, they are almost fifteen months old and weigh over twenty-five pounds.

Being a NICU parent is like parenting on steroids. Parents “on the outside” can live their entire parenting careers deluding themselves that they have some semblance of control over their children. But the truth is, children go and grow at their own rate. The most we can do as parents is guide their progress. We can’t control when our children crawl or read or get married. All we can do is facilitate crawling or reading or fostering healthy relationships and the worst we can do is hamper their progress.

NICU parents are reminded daily that there is no control to be had. The most I could do as a mom was visit, change diapers, hold the twins, tell them I love them, and pump, pump, pump. That, and make sure that I was fed and rested so that I could come back the next day to do it all over again.

Every day for three months, I visited my sons in the NICU. I’d change their diapers and take their temperature and move the pulse-ox sensor from ankle to wrist and back again. I pumped every three hours (or tried to). When the twins were stable enough, I held them skin-to-skin. I told my boys about the sister who was waiting at home, the daddy who was at work and would visit them later tonight, the grandma who was cooking our meals, and about the doctors and nurses who were taking care of them every second that they were in the nursery.

I didn’t realize until much later—after the twins were home doing normal baby things like nursing and cooing and grabbing earrings—what all those diaper changes taught me about my babies. I knew which cries were grumpy cries and which ones were hungry cries. I knew how to soothe them. I knew them as individual people, tiny heroes who had been through more in the first ninety days of life than I had in forty years and who taught me that patience is a skill to practice, not a thing to have or lose.

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