They clap when you bring the baby home—finally, miraculously, out of the NICU.
They celebrate the milestones, the trials overcome, and mark the battle as won.
You made it. You’re home. You’re okay, the baby’s okay.
But what about what comes after?
What about the silence that follows the storm?
The slow, aching process of unpacking trauma no one talks about, and few understand.
The wounds no one sees. The moments you’re expected to be grateful when you’re still gasping for air. The days spent trying to be okay, when so much of the past few months have been very much not okay.
What about the nights when the adrenaline fades, but your body is still stuck in survival mode—heart racing, thoughts spiraling, hands trembling?
What about when the meals stop, the check-ins slow down, and the world assumes you’re fine, because the crisis, in their eyes, has passed?
You’re stuck in the messy middle. Stuck between “the event” and “the rest of your life.”
Wrestling with the dissonance between who you were before and who you are now, realizing how this has changed you.
Trying to find your footing in a new normal that feels anything but.
You want to move forward. To heal.
But it’s harder than you thought it would be.
The grief hits in waves—grieving the birth you didn’t get, the weeks or months lost in sterile hospital rooms, the tiny wires and alarms etched into your memory, replaying again and again.
Your body feels foreign and incompetent.
Your mind replays moments you can’t bring yourself to say out loud.
Your baby feels both miraculous and fragile, strong and somehow still like a tiny stranger.
Milestones come with a mix of pride and panic.
You compare, then shame yourself for comparing.
You try to hold joy and sadness in the same hand, but it’s heavy, it’s confusing.
The exhaustion is more than physical.
It’s emotional. Spiritual. Mental.
You feel desolate.
You have been stripped down to the studs.
And now, slowly—painfully—you are rebuilding.
Brick by brick. Day by day.
And somewhere along the way, you begin to notice something: You’re not just surviving anymore. You’re learning to live again. You can breathe, really breathe!
The fog begins to lift. You can see the light again, however faint.
You are growing and getting stronger, just as your tiny baby is.
And that—that—deserves to be seen.
Deserves compassion.
Deserves a standing ovation.
To the NICU parent in the after: I see you.
You are doing holy work in the quiet, and your healing matters just as much as your survival.
by Stacey Skrysak 
by Emily Collins 
