Four years later.

If you had told me 4 years ago that my daughter’s due date would come and pass without much thought — not even a panic attack — I would have told you that you were mistaken.

 Not many people even remember their child’s due date past the first year, but when your baby is born a full 16 weeks before theirs, you remember.

The first year, when she was still in the NICU, we celebrated her due date — that she was still with us, that she had struggled and survived and fought for 16 weeks and was finally getting better and bigger. And yet, I mourned the fact that she had been here for that long already, instead of growing in my womb. My daughter’s due date coincides with a friend’s NICU Coming Home day, and this year, instead of mourning Holly’s due date, I celebrated my friend’s milestone.

As the years have passed, each year her due date has arrived with less dread, reminding me less and less of my failure to keep her in. As she has grown, it doesn’t carry the weight it once did. I now realize that the failure wasn’t mine, but something that happened to us. I have been lucky to meet some women who shared similar traumas with their births, and through talking and sharing, I have been able to come to terms with what happened to my daughter, to me, to my family, and to my marriage. The milestones associated with her birthday, her due date, her coming home day, her myriad therapy appointments and graduations — they’ve lost their sharp edges as the years have gone on.

My daughter is 4 now and is funny, kind, messy, loving, and has opinions about everything. I still have moments when I check on her at night and see her little sleeping face and her sprawling body and wonder how we got here — from her tiny, fragile, one-pound body — in just four years. Those moments still bring tears to my eyes, but instead of tears of anger, they are tears of happiness.

If you had told me that four years was enough to dull the edge off the knife of NICU trauma, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are. It still cuts from time to time, but it’s not the constant that it once was. Once upon a time, there was no room in my brain or heart to envision a future in which we could be at home and happy together, a future outside the walls of the NICU. Four years later, I am happy to be where I am.