When you become a mum life gets crazy even if you’ve had a straightforward pregnancy and birth and have a miracle child who sleeps, eats and poos when you ask it to. You end up breastfeeding on the toilet, cleaning projectile poo from the living room wall, and hiding so many vegetables in the pasta sauce that it doesn’t leave the spoon when you lift it.
When you have a preemie these types of crazy, and often terrifying, parenting moments double, triple, quadruple until crazy becomes normal and the old normal ceases to exist at all. Life is suddenly filled with NG tubes, bradys and desats, blood gases and reflux and soon you don’t remember a time when you didn’t know what those things were. Supermarket shops are always done with the rain cover pulled firmly down over the pram whatever the weather and regardless of old ladies tutting. Preemie parents see germs everywhere. They know that even a simple cold could land their baby back in hospital on a ventilator. They don’t take chances.
Lifeofapreemiemum.com is about those crazy parenting moments that life becomes filled with when you become a mum to a preemie. It’s about what those moments mean to me, how I feel, what my short-term and long-term emotional responses are, and how I am changing as a result of new experiences. It’s also about how many of those experiences are shared by other preemie parents, or parents whose children are sick.
“When we establish human connections within the context of shared experience we create community wherever we go.”
Gina Greenlee, Postcards and Pearls: Life Lessons from Solo Moments on the Road
Are you a preemie parent? Or maybe you have a little one who had to spend time in hospital for other reasons. How has your life changed as a result? What crazy parenting moments do your days involve? Please add your comments and thoughts below.
Life of a Preemie Mum 