Hellobee

I just finished reading Deanna Fei’s Girl In Glass: How My “Distressed Baby” Defied the Odds, Shamed a CEO, and Taught Me the Essence of Love, Heartbreak, and Miracles and I feel eager to recommend it to anyone who has experience with preemies or NICUs. Her account felt eerily similar to my own experience, her thoughts and feelings, the way she described the details. Reading it was incredibly cathartic.

Her memoir charts her experience with her daughter’s unexplainable premature birth, three months in the NICU, and the media frenzy when said NICU stay was cited publicly by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, her husband’s employer, as the reason for that year’s employee benefit cutbacks. Her writing is honest and insightful and the detail with which she recalls the NICU and her feelings at that time shot right through me.

Like me, she had a just over one-year-old son at home. Her daughter came at 25 weeks, a whole different world taen my 30 week-er experience; her NICU stay was twice as long with many more scares and setbacks. Still, so much of what she wrote, especially about the experience of having a toddler at home, and the ways she and her husband responded to the experience differently, felt like it came from my own insides.

Like the way full term newborns, who once seemed the most fragile thing in the world, suddenly look huge:

“Before I became a mother, I found the sight of newborns unsettling, when I noticed them at all: those scrunched faces, puny bodies, limp necks. Now this newborn looks, to me, hulking in size and strength, obscenely plump, freakishly ready for the outside world.”

And the experience of what I referred to as “phantom kicks”:

“At night, lying adrift but not asleep, I frequently feel a little fillip inside and reach to caress my belly. There’s the baby. But no; it’s a muscle twitch, a pocket of air, my organs creaking back into place.”

The guilt that never let me be happy when I was away from her, even when it was with my other baby, and the double guilt for not fully enjoying my happy healthy child at home:

“Today it seems impossible to experience joy without a corresponding measure of grief. Everything triumphant about our son is what’s tragic about our daughter.”

Even this, such a random thing, but I felt just the same:

“The fog in my head has subsided just enough that I can read books again, but the travails of fictional characters now seem like cruel contrivances. Memoir seems like the only form that might sustain me…”

It made me go back and re-read what I’d written at that time in my life: her birth story, the experience of being new to the NICU, my experience with kangaroo care and being my own advocate, my lack of patience, reflections after her homecoming, thoughts on her story, my experience breastfeeding a preemie, and how things went when Roman finally met Iris.

And it finally allowed me to let go of that experience. I found that for the longest time I was still full of emotion that would pour out over something like an article about the value of kangaroo care, or a birth scene on a tv show. I held onto my frustrations with the outdated philosophies of our NICU even though my daughter is now happy and healthy and developing normally. I couldn’t be more fortunate, my daughter will never have any memory of this and most likely no consequences from it, and yet I was still feeling a bit traumatized. As we near her first birthday, I am glad to be moving on.

Have you read it? What did you think? How did you move on from your child’s premature birth and NICU experience? Do you recommend any other books or memoirs about preemies or NICUs?