09/01/2026
NICU Awareness Month.
I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to say today because September holds so much for me. There was a time when NICU Awareness Month represented one of the hardest chapters of my life.
I learned how to mother beside an isolette. I learned the sounds of monitors I never wanted to know. I learned how to pump while separated from my baby. I learned how grief and gratitude could somehow exist in the same body. And I learned something that eventually became part of the reason for A NICU Mother’s Journey:
The NICU is postpartum too.
There is a mental and emotional side of the NICU experience that isn’t always visible.
The fear.
The guilt.
The anxiety.
The exhaustion.
The waiting.
The prayers.
The small victories that feel enormous.The fear of celebrating too soon. And the strange reality of loving the baby in front of you with everything you have while grieving the pregnancy, birth and postpartum experience you thought you would have.
So September will always hold space for that version of me.
But this September feels different.
I get to look at Journi now and see life beyond those NICU walls.
And this year, I enter NICU Awareness Month carrying her baby brother, Isaiah — approaching 35 weeks pregnant, a place in pregnancy I once wasn’t sure I would ever experience.
This month isn’t only a reminder of what we’ve survived.
For me, it has become a reminder of what God can do with a story that once felt completely broken.
And most importantly, it reminds me why I continue to share.
Because somewhere there is a mother sitting beside an isolette who cannot imagine life beyond today.
Somewhere there is a former NICU mother who still feels something in her chest when she hears a monitor beep.
Somewhere there is a mother celebrating milestones no one else understands.
And somewhere there is a family grieving a baby they will never stop loving.
This month, there is room for every NICU story.
The miracle stories.
The complicated stories.
The unfinished stories.
And the stories we carry in remembrance.
💜 NICU moms: share your testimony with me.
September is NICU Awareness Month.
