Coping in a crisis is hard no matter what. The similarities between living through the harrowing days or months of your baby’s NICU stay and their first years of life, and living through a pandemic, are real.
Social isolation. Schedules and routines upended. An unknown road ahead with an end point we don’t yet know. Fear. Financial and logistical stresses. A new medical language to learn as we grow to understand public health terms and what they mean for our family. Aloneness and a lack of support. Hand sanitizer. Health anxiety. Grief and loss for the little and big things, and especially for our expectations of what this time in our lives would look like.
Duality of Emotion is a concept I discuss often with NICU parents. (And humans in general!) It is the universal experience of feeling simultaneous emotion from different ends of a spectrum: connection and trauma, joy and sadness, gratitude and pain. We invite every emotion to coexist HERE: in the NICU, after discharge, in parenting, and in life. YES, especially during a pandemic!
You need all your feelings right now—without judgement—to help you make sense of where you are at.
To all my former NICU parents, this place we are in right now may feel familiar.
To all my current NICU parents navigating your journeys during this historic time, we know the pandemic only adds another layer of challenge to an already stressful experience. My heart is with yours.
Parenting a baby in the NICU is a stand alone trauma, and so is a pandemic. The impact of either event on life as you knew it may also trigger past trauma because grief journeys are weird like that! When you are triggered, please remember that you have ✨grown.✨ You are in a different place now, with a new vantage point. This is progress, not regression!
Here are 7 ideas to help you cope through your parenting journey in the NICU and beyond!
1. Set Your Sights on the Longterm
A NICU stay is a medical crisis that most parents do not expect and have not prepared for. It takes time for shock and confusion to dissipate, and for you to begin to make sense of what has happened and what this means for your baby and for your family. Even when you have accurate information about your baby’s current health status or the anticipated timeline for their hospitalization, it is human nature to make plans based on projections for the best-case scenario.
When my son was born at 33 weeks his nurses shared the universal criteria for graduating from the NICU. They told me to look to his due date as an indicator for when he would be ready for discharge. It was hard for me at the time, to believe that my 4lb baby would need 7 weeks in the ICU, or that I would be away from his big brother for as long, and so I lived each day one at a time with the expectation that it would be days NOT weeks before he came home. Every day I was disappointed that he wasn’t making faster progress. We never made a long term plan for his NICU stay because I was in denial.
Our response to the newly imposed social distancing protocol can play out like that too. Even when we are told that these constraints are in place for 2 weeks, or 2 months or longer, we still hang on to the possibility that it may not be required to last that long. We hope for the least impact because we can’t imagine losing our freedom to move about in the world, to not see our friends or family, or to not have help with our kids while working from home for that length of time.
Maybe you are past the denial stage—maybe not! Wherever you are in your experience when you are able to accept and even embrace a realistic timeline the sooner you can make a plan for how best to meet the needs of your family right now and find a rhythm that works.
Yes, time unfurls into the unknown. Fear and uncertainty about what the future may bring can feel oppressive, but here we are! Gather up all the information you know right now and use it to make a logistical plan for the longterm so you aren’t feeling strung along by the daily ups and downs.
Stay on your planned course, and when you get updated or additional information you will be in a flexible position to respond and further adapt as needed.
2. Tackle Your Timeline in Increments
Planning for the unknown is a lot of work and it can be overwhelming to try to anticipate what you don’t know. Sometimes coping happens hour by hour, or day by day, especially in the beginning. Once you find your footing it may be helpful to take a bird’s eye view for the big picture (based on your baby’s due date), and then zoom-in to plan for the week ahead.
3. Find Your “Now Routine” and Stay Flexible
Develop and implement a routine that supports a good enough foundation for daily living, and also offers you the freedom to be responsive to the inevitable changing needs within your family, or a day that doesn’t go as you had hoped.
In times of crisis, the loss of our routines can feel like grief as we are left to fend for ourselves without the structure and purpose we usually rely on. Wanting to hold on to Life Before This—or parts of it—during a time that can’t realistically support it may create more stress than if we let it all go and start over.
Get creative with the current constraints and look for the opportunities. Pick the parts that you can’t thrive without: time with your baby in the NICU, sleep, fresh air and nature, moving your body, connection, quality time with older siblings and a partner or friend, nutritious food you enjoy. Look at your week and fill it first with these “big stones” to ensure basic needs are met, and then see what else you can fit in around them. Work your routine until it doesn’t work any more. You will know when! Then you’ll just make a new one.
4. Triage the Fires and Check in With Yourself Frequently
It can be tough to adapt to the unexpected. Sometimes you have to drop everything to deal with something big. Do that, and then circle back with yourself when you find the space, so you can redefine your needs in this moment and find clarity about how best to take care of yourself so that you can take care of others. Knowing what YOU need in a given moment is essential and not always easy to identify. So take a little time for yourself and check in.
5. Connect—Focus on Relationships Inside Your Circle of Responsibility
Does your baby have older siblings? Do you and your partner need each other now, more than ever? Connect, repair, let the rest fall away. Make the best of your days and know that you won’t be able to meet everyone 100%—it’s not possible. Kids and partners have their own stresses and feelings about what is happening. You can focus on doing your best to keep a regular family routine, help create an environment where your kids feel safe and loved, and make time to have a little fun together too.
For those outside of your circle of responsibility: grandparents, extended family, concerned friends—they may ask for your reassurance that your baby is going to be ok, or that you and your family are ok, they may want frequent updates or need you to help them cope through their own feelings and grief. Now isn’t the time to worry about more than you have bandwidth for. It’s ok to set boundaries and share what you want to share with whomever it feels good to share it with and know that you are not obligated to keep others informed, up to date, or to carry the burden of anyone else’s process.
6. Narrow your Focus
If your coping response leads to high productivity that’s fine! If your coping response looks more like surviving that is fine too. It’s totally reasonable to set and hold firm boundaries right now, to protect or let go of whatever is and isn’t working for you. It’s hard to keep up with everything happening outside your own experience. There is no right way to cope in a crisis. Keep it simple and do what you can. This time is not forever. Later will come later, it really will.
7. Choose One Small Thing You Can Do for Yourself Every Day
This is hard. Taking care of yourself is important.
Simple but effective, choose a mix of the following and create your own recipe for successful self care:
Make 8 hours of sleep a priority. If you are pumping give yourself one 4- to 5-hour block of uninterrupted sleep.
Fuel up with nutritious foods you enjoy
Make space for solitude—start small if you have to. Five minutes alone. 15 minutes alone. 30 minutes or an hour or more!
Connect with family and friends who get you
Move your body most days in ways that feel good to you
Talk to a therapist or counselor, in person or virtually
Join a peer support group, or use your network to create your own
Check in with your doctor about your mental health and get medication if you need it
Reach out to your friends, family, and community for help! If you’re not sure where to start we’ve got a resource full of ideas for you right here.
Know that you are loved by your family no matter what, and that you are a good parent, and that you can absolutely do this! I’m rooting for you.