Imagine...taking your 5-year-old son for a haircut and hearing the person cutting his hair say, "Oh, he has a cute cowlick" and biting your tongue from remarking for the 100th time "No, it's the scar from one of his scalp IVs that makes his hair flip that way."

Imagine...hearing your 3-1/2 year old son say to you "I want to be in your tummy and be a baby and be happy" and wish you could have done that for him too, way back when, instead of having him be eased out nearly three months preterm via emergency cesarean with the cord wrapped tightly three times around his soft thin neck...

Imagine...having your little boys look at their NICU photos and not even blink when they see themselves tied up with endotracheal tubing, multiple IVs, EEG cables, femoral catheters, central lines, bili-light patches, surgical dressings, warm water-sodden diapers on their feet to prepare for the next heel stick...isn't this what all newborns look like?

Imagine...tracing your finger along multiple scars on your now healthy 5-year-old son's abdomen and remembering the absolute rawness of those fresh incisions and the image of heavy black thread lacing your 2-day-old infant son together like some kind of odd scrap of patchwork, along with the two-headed raspberry of his double-barreled stoma poking out as the centerpiece...

Imagine...relinquishing your perfectly formed 2-day-old son's body to a transplant surgeon who, through the skill of his hands and the sharpness of his sight, will transform your new baby into one that has been carved into by the cold steel of a scalpel over and over and over, all in order to help him live another day, and then another, and then another after that until the days start to snowball and your child blows five candles out on his birthday cake...

Imagine...on a Sunday drive with your children, you and your spouse excitedly point to places of interest that include where they were born, where they lived for their first three months, where they had their first bath, where their grandparents first held them, where they were coo'd over and loved and prayed for, where they learned to breathe, eat, grow and stay warm, where death hovered and watched and waited...and then driving on past, as all of this happened in the NICU...

Imagine...your 3-1/2 year old's favorite dinnertime activity is blowing the candles out after supper, and as you watch him purse his lips and gather up a big breath, you remember the endless minutes you spent blowing into his own mouth and nose to offer life as his gray-skinned, motionless 4-pound body lay dying in your arms due to respiratory syncytial virus...seeing him now proudly snuff out that flame on the candle and realizing once more that death had been just that close to extinguishing his own bright light...

Imagine...living in the Midwest where there are deer roaming, lakes full of fish, rich agriculture, hundreds of thousands of acres of beautiful countryside, all preserved and monitored by the Department of Natural Resources, yet every time you read an article about the splendor of your state and the role of the DNR, you do not "see" DNR as Department of Natural Resources, you see DNR, Do Not Resuscitate, and remember when that was one of your options as your son rested quietly on his open warming table, lungs useless, kidneys weakened, brain compromised, blood supply septic, body seizing...

imagine taking that same child three years later to a local park and watching him chase his older brother, another premature baby, on the slides, the swings, hearing their boisterous voices exclaim, "Watch this!" and "Follow me!" and knowing that these two children are among our most precious resources on the planet...

Imagine...laughing gently in a cynical way when filling in your children's baby books and seeing the three or four lines the authors include for "Doctor's Visits," as you have a crate full of NICU medical records, neonatal follow-up clinic assessments, specialists' reports, speech therapy notes and billing documentation from the hospital finance office totaling upwards of a million dollars for their care...imagine penning in the words "too numerous to mention, my love..." in the space available instead...

Imagine...hearing your now healthy preschool-age child wake up crying in the night, choking out the words "I miss Alex Jane," a sister who died before he was born...imagine your own tears as you gratefully enclose his warm body into your own as a fast blur of life without any surviving children suddenly leaves you breathless...

imagine witnessing the astonishing insight that your children have about life and death, loss and suffering, courage and strength, about compassion...imagine wanting to be just like your children when you grow up...

Maureen
Momma to Cailean and Devon, 29-weekers, now big kids in a big kid world and to Alexandra Jane, 37-weeker then, now and always, keeper of my heart