A NICU Mom's Story: Grieving the Birth You Didn't Get (143)

There's a kind of grief that doesn't get a lot of airtime. It belongs to the mom whose baby survived.

She left the hospital eventually with her baby in her arms, and everyone around her breathed a sigh of relief and said, "See? Everything worked out." And she smiled and nodded and went home and cried in the shower, because something inside her still felt broken.

Grief after a traumatic birth is real. It doesn't need permission from anyone. And after my conversation with Jodi Klaristenfeld, a preemie and NICU parent coach, I'm more convinced than ever that loss moms and NICU moms are walking a lot of the same road. Different ending. Same guilt. Same "what if" loop. Same feeling that nobody quite gets it.

So let's talk about it.

28 Easy Weeks and Four Terrible Days

Jodi's pregnancy was, in her words, the easiest 28 weeks. She had a checkup and everything looked perfect. No elevated blood pressure. Nothing to flag.

Then over one weekend, things started going sideways. She gained 20 pounds in four days. She had a bloody nose that wouldn't stop. Her urine turned orange. And because it was her first pregnancy, she did what so many of us do. She rationalized every single one of those signs.

It's just pregnancy catching up with me. It's just the dry winter air. It's probably nothing.

What finally sent her to the doctor was waking up seeing double. She walked into the hospital at 1:00. Her daughter Jenna was born at 3:16 that afternoon, at 28 weeks and four days. Jodi had preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome, and her OB told her mom that if he didn't take the baby right then, he was going to lose them both.

Jodi was so sick she didn't meet her own daughter for three days.

If you've experienced stillbirth, I know a piece of that story probably landed in your chest. The signs you talked yourself out of. The "it's probably nothing" you'd give anything to take back. That's the first thread that ties us together.

Why We Talk Ourselves Out of the Warning Signs

This is the part of the conversation I keep coming back to. Jodi and I both wondered out loud: why do we do that? Why do we look at a bloody nose or a headache or a weird feeling and decide it's not worth a phone call?

Part of it is just not knowing. Nobody hands you a list of what preeclampsia looks like at your baby shower.

But part of it, I think, is how a lot of us were raised. We don't want to bother the doctor. We don't want to be too much. We don't want to be the woman who calls the office over every little thing. Somewhere along the way we learned that asking questions makes us look difficult, and we'd rather look easygoing than look scared.

Jodi's message to every pregnant woman now is simple. If something seems off, go. Don't decide for yourself that it's fine. Let the doctor be the one to tell you it's fine.

And if you're reading this after a loss, replaying the moment you didn't call, please hear this too. You made the decision any reasonable woman would have made with the information you had. Rationalizing symptoms is not a character flaw. It's what humans do. You did not cause this by being a person.

The First Time She Saw Her Baby

When Jodi's husband told her they were going down to the NICU to meet their daughter, she didn't want to go.

She felt physically wrecked, mentally foggy from the magnesium, emotionally shattered, and terrified of what she'd see. She was ashamed of not wanting to go. She thought that meant something was wrong with her as a mother.

There was nothing wrong with her. She'd just lived through something huge and didn't have the words for it yet.

Her husband pushed. He told her she could walk, that a nurse would follow with the wheelchair just in case, but she was going to walk in there and meet their daughter. She saw Jenna's name on the isolette. She saw skin so thin it looked almost clear. Tubes, a blood pressure cuff on a tiny ankle, machines everywhere. When he asked if she wanted to hold her, she said she wasn't ready.

Seven years later, she still feels bad about that.

I understand this one in my bones. When my twin girls were born still, I didn't want to see them either. Who wants to see that? My husband kept saying, "I really think you should." The nurses were standing by with a disposable camera and I remember thinking, who on earth would want pictures of this?

Now those pictures are some of the most precious things I own.

Whether your baby lived or didn't, that moment of not wanting to look, not wanting to hold, not wanting to feel it all at once... that's not a failure of love. It's a body and a brain trying to survive. You don't have to feel guilty for being scared of the hardest moment of your life.

"But She's Fine Now" and Other Things That Don't Help

Here's where NICU moms and loss moms get treated very differently by the world, and yet end up feeling the same.

A loss mom hears, "At least you can get pregnant again." A NICU mom hears, "But look at her, she's healthy now. You're so lucky."

Both comments do the same thing. They skip right past the mother.

Jodi is grateful. She says it every single day. And she also says this: being grateful doesn't mean she's 100% okay with her birth story. Both are true. She lived through a birth where her body was, as she puts it, rejecting the pregnancy. She grieved the labor she never had, the golden-hour bonding moment she never got, the three days she spent not knowing who was feeding her baby.

She even grieved in a boutique on the Upper East Side, breaking down because there wasn't a single outfit small enough to take her daughter home in. "Everything has been taken from me," she told her mom. "Why this too?"

To someone else, an outfit is a small thing. To a mom who has lost every normal milestone one after another, it's the straw that breaks her.

Nobody gets to decide from the outside what's a small thing and what isn't. Not for her. Not for you.

When the Birthday Is Also the Anniversary

There's a particular kind of dread that comes with the calendar, and NICU moms know it too.

Jodi told me she cried for weeks leading up to Jenna's first birthday. Not because she wasn't thrilled her daughter was one. Because a traumatic birthday is two things at once. It's a celebration, and it's the anniversary of the day you almost lost everything. Your body remembers. Your mind replays it. And everyone else just sees cake and balloons.

If you're a loss mom, you know this exact split. The due date that came and went. The birthday that's also the day you said goodbye. The holiday with an empty seat.

You can love a day and dread it at the same time. That's not you being ungrateful or stuck. That's a mother marking a date that means more than one thing.

The Guilt That Doesn't Care If Your Baby Lived

I asked Jodi if the moms she works with struggle with self-blame. Her answer? A ton.

Preeclampsia essentially means your body couldn't keep the pregnancy going. That is a heavy thing to sit with. And then it spreads. Every developmental milestone becomes a fresh chance to blame yourself. Every playgroup where your child is the smallest. Every "Is she walking yet? Is she talking?"

Nothing a mother does or doesn't do causes preeclampsia. Nothing she does causes spontaneous preterm labor. Jodi says the hardest part is accepting that sometimes there simply isn't an answer, and you didn't make this happen.

If that sounds familiar, it's because it's the same guilt loss moms know. The "I should have known" story. The belief that a careful, prepared, smart woman should have been able to prevent this. That story has no ending. It just loops.

Jodi got to a point, around nine months in, where she said, "Okay. I have to get out of my own head." She asked for help. She started working on herself, not because she was failing as a mom before that, but because there was finally a little room to.

The Choice She Made (and Why It Took Months)

What struck me most in Jodi's story is that at some point, she made a choice.

She could have lived in "this isn't fair" for a very long time. Plenty of people do, and I don't blame any of them. Instead she decided to take the situation in front of her and build the best life she could from it. She got her daughter every specialist and evaluation she could. She cheered every tiny milestone like it was the Olympics. She named her business Flourish because that's what she kept telling Jenna's therapists: she's flourishing, she's growing.

But I want to be clear about something Jodi was clear about. That choice took months. It came after the breakdowns, not instead of them. And making it didn't mean she stopped having sad days. She still has them. Grief has no timeline, and choosing to live fully doesn't cancel it out.

You can be grateful and grieving. Relieved and terrified. Happy and heartbroken. Jodi said it best: one does not negate the other.

What This Means for You

Maybe you're a loss mom reading this and thinking, at least she got to take her baby home. I get it. That thought is allowed. It doesn't make you a bad person.

And maybe you're a NICU mom who found this post and felt seen for the first time in a while. You're allowed to grieve a birth story even though your baby is asleep in the next room.

Either way, I hope you take this with you: grief after a traumatic birth isn't a competition, and it isn't a character flaw. It's love that got scared. It's a body that went through something enormous. It's a mother who deserves to have her whole experience honored, not just the parts that are easy for other people to hear.

You don't have to be done with it by now. There's no "by now."

If you want to hear the full conversation, Jodi's story is worth every minute of episode 143. You can find her at flrrish.com or on social media at @flrrish, and her DMs are open.

And if you're a loss mom who is tired of managing the guilt alone, I'd love for you to join me for the 3-Day Experience. It's three live sessions with me and a room full of moms who get it, where we name what you're feeling, look at where the guilt has been showing up, and I teach you the same guilt-spiral release tool I use myself. It's $27, and you keep the recordings and the workbook. No pressure at all. It's just a safe place to start if you're ready for one. You can find the details at navigatingbabyloss.com/workshop.

You're not behind. You're not broken. And you're not doing this alone.

Jennifer Senn is a certified life coach, NLP practitioner, and perinatal grief coach who lost her twin daughters to stillbirth at 32 weeks. She helps stillbirth moms let go of guilt, keep their baby's memory alive, and build a life that feels like theirs again. Learn more at navigatingbabyloss.com.