"Mom"

Mom is a role, a job, and an honorary title. Mother (egg carrier) does not equal mom. I honestly do not think one grasps what Mom means until they are one. Once that happens, your world changes; you are now the protector supreme of someone more important than you. You live, breathe, and would do anything to support or provide for that child. I believe, this position in life transcends all others. I know that regardless of wherever my children are or however old they are or how strained my relationship may be with them I will always feel this way. I will always be there if they should need me. Forever their Mommy I will be.

Last summer I was in a position that was the most helpless and frightening that I have ever experienced in my entire adult life. I was in a place where my role as mom may have changed or even been taken from me. Spending six weeks unsure and unaware of what would happen to my child, confined to a hospital room, alone most days for 23 plus hours, taught me who was there to support me when I needed it most.

As I said, the love for a child transcends any other feeling in your life. When your child is in danger, nothing else really matters. As I spent countless of hours in the NICU after Gunner was born at 33 weeks, I witnessed traumatic things I would never wish on anyone. Things that unless you were there and see it you could never understand. Some that are painfully hard to forget include, seeing multiple failed IV attempts over the course of 1 ½ hours, which I could not even bring myself to watch. I would wander the halls, breaking down in tears in the hallway with each failed attempt and a new attempt at insertion, not caring who saw. Seeing and hearing alarms go off whenever his heart or respiration rate dipped because he was too young to remember how to breathe. Feeding him through a tube placed in his mouth or nose, as opposed to being able to nurse or bottle feed him. Calling the hospital in the middle of the night just to check on him, finding out he had spells (of breathing cessation) or had lost weight instead of gained, during a middle of the night pumping session (in which you are doing the only thing that you can to actually help your child). Loosing sleep, pumping every 2-3 hours of the day or night, sleeping no more than 5 hours each night.

Me, as an individual did not matter; all I was concerned with was my child and his well-being; again, a very vulnerable and frightening time in my life, where the health and survival of my child was in someone else’s hands.  So during this time, again, you learn who you can really count on. In retrospect, at this point, it meant nothing if someone had visited me or sent me flowers, it was all about Gunner. Just a call or email or recognition of his birth, while not full term and health uncertain, meant the world to me. Or any suport that could be offered for my family that I was leaving behind to care for this fragile child. 

If I didn’t get these, I felt I knew what that meant and that was ok, it just wasn’t a relationship that I needed to maintain, or one I could maintain with the effort the other person had exerted. So I concentrated my effort on doing what I could to bring my child home and then once home what I could do to keep him out of the hospital. Essential relationships where someone was able to reach out to me flourished, those that required me to initiate the contact extinguished, as the work of mother of a premature baby is never done. Feeding, sleeping, snuggling and holding are all different, not to mention child care arrangements, doctor type and number of appointments.  I did this all while working a full-time (graciously with PT hours) job as I provide the health insurance for the family.  So, if someone didn’t make time for me, I couldn’t find time to make for them.