7/23 - Comforting Message - Struggling for Your Dreams

But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats.

No one can avoid them.

But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams,

Than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.

Paulo Coelho

NICU Struggles
I think if you would talk to most NICU Parents many would use the words "struggle," "battle," and "challenge" to describe their time in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

I know what I was battling for shortly after my daughter arrived in the NICU. I was fighting to keep my daughter strong enough, in whatever ways I could imagine, and struggling to have her stay on this side and not cross over (not to die).

Dreaming New Dreams
NICU parents have to quickly adjust to the fact that their dream of taking home a healthy happy newborn shortly after delivery is not going to happen.

MOD Family Support Specialist, Melissa offers these words of wisdom:

This was not what you were expecting.
You had dreams of this precious child being born and going home. Storybook fantasies of being a mom...filled your dreams at night.
This is the way you believed things would be...
Not spending your baby's first days in an intensive care unit.

Sometimes we have to sit back and accept that we are working towards a new normal. Our normal.

Melissa
Share Your Story

Sometimes we have to step back, let go of the old dreams and begin dreaming new ones.

The dreams of NICU Parents are often postponed and changed. Dreams of going home with a precious baby...change to ones of having a healthy, happy, peaceful baby at home...at some point.

Source:
Melissa. Baby in the NICU. Share Your Story. May 2, 2007.

Photo Source: Dick Herrmann. Sleeping Baby. Use with Permission. www.lakepeople.de