created at: 2012-03-23Posted by Peggy Kaufman

This week I received an amazing letter of gratitude from a mother who has recently been served by Fragile Beginnings, a program of the Center for Early Relationship Support®. Her remarks are extremely gratifying  and a strong testament to our work. I choose to share this today on the occasion of the first national Parents of Preemies Day as her beautiful words provide a glimpse into the complex emotions experienced by parents whose babies are born prematurely or hospitalized in a neonatal intensive care unit. It also demonstrates the powerful impact that support and understanding can have on the families of preemies – something all of us can provide!  

I am pleased to share, with her permission, an excerpt from this mom’s letter:

I’m writing to share how fantastic the Fragile Beginnings Family Liaison has been with me over the past months. I have an infant daughter who was born extremely early and spent the first 3 months of her life at the BWH NICU, where the social worker referred me to Fragile Beginnings. I was both entirely ready to bring Sylvie* home from the hospital and terrified that I wouldn’t be able to take adequate care of her. I also had a lot of conflicting questions and emotions more generally: was Sylvie really OK? What would happen next? Would she need to go back into the hospital? I am not a nurse, nor do I have other children, so I didn’t have any idea of what kind of daily routine I’d need to establish. Most of all I felt a large and seemingly-permanent knot of pain, love, fear, and hope for my daughter.

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