Celebrating Ready for Air: A Journey through Premature Motherhood/Kate Hopper

In the fall of 2008, I spent time with the doctors, nurses, parents, and babies of a nationally ranked neonatal intensive care unit in Philadelphia. I had traveled there at the request of a client, a generous not-for-profit called St. Christopher's Foundation for Children. I was in the company of a handful of young people who were learning about the world around them and the institutions that mattered in their own neighborhoods. It was a journey of exceptional proportions—the tiniest fingers, the most vulnerable dreams.

There was so much pure fragility in those rooms that day. There was also so much hope, thanks to the groundbreaking science that continues to get done on behalf of babies born too soon. Last week I was brought back to this sacred day of many years ago—the harrowing smallness, the breath-giving possibilities—as I read Kate Hopper's intense and intensely involving memoir Ready for Air: A Journey through Premature Motherhood. This is Kate's story; it is her family's story. It is the sequence of events that leads this first-time mother from simply dreaming about her baby during a warm Minnesota summer to fearing for her life—not just the baby's life, but Kate's own.

Some half a million babies are born prematurely in this country each year, Kate tells us. The costs—physical, emotional, financial—are staggering, and even when the child is finally able to come home, this tiny bundle represents challenges no parent ever sees coming. Isolation. Doubt. The challenge of bonding with one so very tiny, so still too new.

Kate, whom I have been privileged to know for a long time now through the ether of this internet world, has written the details of her harrowing journey down. We meet her husband, her sisters, her parents, her friends. We see what it is—feel what it is—to be subject to so many unknowns, and we lean forward with Kate, hope for all that she hopes for, celebrate all she finally has to celebrate.

It's personal. It's honest. It's compelling.

Ready for Air, written in the months and years after Kate's baby comes home, is a triumph, and I encourage you to get a copy of your own. I also invite you to participate in something very special: a chance to suggest NICUs where a free copy of Kate's book might be sent. For more information about that NICU giveaway, please click on this link.

Thank you, on behalf of Kate and of all babies, big and small.

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Dine In/Help Out

Last year, I had the privilege of hosting two of my long-time clients—Mike Cola, until recently the president of Shire Pharmaceuticals, and Jerry Sweeney, the CEO of Brandywine Realty Trust, along with the beautiful women in their lives, for an initiative called Dine In/Help Out.  Dine In/Help Out is designed to promote healthy eating through its Farm to Families program.  I chronicled my efforts here, on the blog.  Confessed to being a less-than-perfect cook who is blessed with near-perfect friends.

This summer St. Christopher's Foundation for Children is sponsoring its second DIHO event, and because I adore Jan Shaeffer, the Foundation's executive director, and because the St. Christopher's Foundation crowd is my all-time most favorite philanthropic Philly crowd, I was there, at the launch party.  Read about the whole story here, in this Joan A. Bang Mainline Media News.  Or go to the Dine In/Help Out site and see what you can do to have fun and help this worthy cause.

Thank you, Kimberly Hallman of Devine + Powers, for sending this to me just now.

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Dine In, Help Out: The Day After

Many of you have kindly sent your your encouragements to me during these Dine In, Help Out days, and so this is my final report back to you: it was a good and right thing to do.

Because the fact is that you can spend as much time as you want casting spider webs aside or watching Nick edge new stones into the garden. You can wonder obsessively if the yellow callas detract from the rust callas, if you have any business attempting appetizers, if you are just plain out of your mind for inviting two of the area's top business leaders and their beautiful women into your very modest home. You can wonder and you can worry, and then 6:30 comes, and there's no going back: the party finally begins.

It's not really, in the end, the food that makes a party (thank goodness). No one takes a tour of the garden and judges the stone work. No one searches for spider webs, or if they do, it frankly doesn't matter. People make a party, and last night I had the privilege of introducing two men to each other who share so many things—a talent for dreaming big and acting effectively on those dreams (these men build companies; they build legacies), a distinctly philanthropic lean, a transparent commitment to the families they have built, an abiding love for their fathers, and so much shared interest in farming ways that a good half hour of talk gets given over to the egg-laying-business of chickens.

These men also have incredibly good taste in women, and toward the end of the evening, MA asked if I might talk a little a bit Dine In, Help Out, this May-long initiative sponsored by St. Christopher's Foundation for Children. It's pretty simple, I said. Philadelphia-area residents are inviting friends to dinner in their homes throughout the month of May and encouraging those friends to contribute whatever they might have spent on a restaurant meal that evening to the Foundation.  The Foundation in turn is channeling those funds into a Farm to Families program focused on bringing affordable, nutritious food to North Philadelphia, the nation's second hungriest congressional district.

It's all thanks to my friend, Jan Suzanne Shaeffer, who has a heart the color of her very golden hair and who never works in the abstract. She cares about the plight of North Philadelphians because she has taken the time to make them her friends. She is doing good because good is her passion, her happy gift. I'm hugely uncomfortable in any fundraising role, but I did this because I believe in Jan and I believe in this cause.  I have worked way outside my comfort zone, these past few weeks, and I can't tell you if the food I cooked was any good because I was too nervous to eat it. But because of Jan I had, in last night, an evening I'll never forget.

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Dine In, Help Out: Philadelphians Taking a Stand Against Hunger

May has been decreed Dine In, Help Out month in my wonderful city—a time when we gather friends around us, in our own homes, and donate whatever we might have spent at a restaurant to a program devoted to bringing affordable, healthy, farm-fresh food into North Philadelphia homes.  The innovative St. Christopher's Foundation for Children has organized the drive, and it has the remarkable support of Iron Chef Jose Garces, not to mention NBC 10’s Dennis Bianchi, Philadelphia Media Network's Greg Osberg, and Montgomery McCracken’s Steve Madva.

My own dinner is slated for six days from now, and I've invited two long-time clients and their beautiful ladies to my house.  That takes guts, as you can imagine, for a modest-living woman such as myself—no grand chef, no proven hostess, and far better with words than I am with soup spoons.

But I'm doing this, nonetheless, and I encourage you to consider throwing a dinner yourself.  Check out the web site linked above.  You'll find recipes, invitations, ideas, and facts that will both inspire and motivate.

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Dine In, Help Out: Philadelphians Taking a Stand Against Hunger

I seek out Philadelphians who make a difference; sometimes I have the honor of calling them friends.  Tonight I joined old friends and new at JG Domestic, an innovative Jose Garces restaurant, to herald the launch of Dine In, Help Out, an initiative designed to increase access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food in North Philadelphia, one of the poorest—and hungriest—congressional districts in our country.

The initiative is the brainchild of Jan Suzanne Shaeffer, who isn't just my beautiful and witty friend; she's also the executive director of St. Christopher's Foundation for Children, an organization with an established interest in the people of North Philadelphia. Not long ago, Jan and her board read the  devastating Philadelphia Inquirer portrait of North Philadelphia hunger and began to work toward solutions.

Through its very own Farm to Families, the Foundation is already bringing fresh farm foods to those North Philadelphians whose diets are saturated with health-compromising sugars and fats. Through Dine In, Help Out the Foundation raises the ante—asking friends and families across the region to commit to forgoing "one night of dining out by donating the dollars they would have spent at a restaurant to help bring affordable, healthy, farm-fresh food into North Philadelphia homes."

It is an idea that has caught the imagination of many.  It has, moreover, won the backing of those who are pictured here (left to right) with Jan—Philadelphia Media Network CEO Greg Osberg; NBC 10 President and General Manager Dennis Bianchi, Iron Chef Jose Garces (I have all my most important meals at his restaurants); and Montgomery McCracken Managing Partner Steve Madva.

Others of us are proud ambassadors—people who have committed to hosting meals in their homes on behalf of this initiative.  I'll be having a small event at my own home in early May (hoping that clean windows, fine Ikebana arrangements, and a newly mulched garden will compensate for any flaws in my menu).  I'm encouraging others of you to do the same.  It's time, every now and then, to remember how very blessed we are.  It's time to come together, over our own tables, so that we might give back to those in need.

Please look for more information here, on Dine In, Help Out's spanking new web site.   

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Hunger

I haven't traveled nearly as much as I long to lately, but my life journeys me down so many roads.  So that yesterday afternoon, in the still, a friend arrived and here we sat talking, among other things, about her passion (proven, honest) for being part of hunger's cure.  We talked numbers, and we talked families.  We talked about what local farmers can do and already are doing to help bring nutrition, and not just empty calories, to North Philadelphians in need.

"We need new ways to tell our story," she said, and all through the night I dreamed.

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In Memory of Her

A few moments ago, Jan Shaeffer, the executive director of St. Christopher's Foundation for Children and a friend, called with stunningly sad news about a beautiful young woman—this young woman—whom I'd interviewed and photographed last fall. She had been living in the Ronald McDonald House adjacent to St. Christopher's Hospital, and as part of an annual report project, I'd sat with her a few days shy of Halloween and talked about her life and the ways in which it had been shaped by cancer. She had moved me immeasurably, as I had then written here: The way she spoke with honesty of what was passing her by. The fierceness with which she approached her own survival. Her determination to get well so that she could return to a hospital one day not as a patient, but as a nurse.

Today I learn that she did not win her battle. Today I am remembering her alive.

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The Children of North Philadelphia in Words and Pictures

As those of you who have visited this blog know, I recently had the great privilege of spending a day in North Philadelphia among those who are working to make lives better for children, and among the children themselves.

This vlog tells that story in words and pictures. It, like St. Christopher's Foundation for Children that sponsors the programs I visited, holds hope high and (I'll use that word again) aloft.

The music is from Les Choristes.

Thank you, Scott Waz of Audio Post, for helping me re-engineer the sound.

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Pulse Red

In the neo-natal intensive care unit of St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, there are the babies born too soon, the families who love them, and the doctors and the nurses who fight the daily battle, not just for survival but for quality of life.

Last week while there taking photographs on behalf of St. Christopher's Foundation for Children, I met a young man and his girlfriend, high school age. Their baby had been born at just 27 weeks six days before, and now inside the warming bed he lay, scarred by surgery, linked into life by machines.

"Look at this," the young father gestured, and he began to introduce me to his child. "He got his ears from my girlfriend, see?" he said. "He got his chin from me. I cut off my dreadlocks when he was born. I want to be a respectable dad." Then this young man—charismatic, beautiful, his smile like a tilted crescent moon—slipped his hand inside the circle opening of the covered warming bed and fit it upon his baby's tiny head—big as an oversized cap, and gentle. "Take our picture," he said, and through the thick plastic, past all those tubes, I did.

It will be late January, at the earliest, before this baby goes home. Between now and then, his parents will be driven to the hospital every day after school by his great-grandfather on his mother's side.

The future must be imagined every day. It must be hoped for.

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Do Not not Cross Tracks

Last night I sat at dinner with a gorgeous 15-year-old girl who told me just part of her story. The tumor that first appeared when she was 13. The tumor that returned. Her last eight months lived inside the walls of a hospital, and, at night, within the gracious, truly good rooms of a Ronald McDonald house.

She didn't, she said, remember the color of her own hair.

She hasn't gone home, not one day, in the past eight months.

Her wig was black.

Her skin was porcelain.

She will be, she said, smiling, then taking true pleasure from the thought, Snow White for Halloween.

We fashion heroines for our novels, we tread up and down the street of our own worries, and out in the world all around us are people like this young woman who are living lives we can't imagine, living those lives gracefully.

I got on a train. I took a ride. I crossed the tracks, beyond myself.

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My Double Life and the Good Beyond

Though I write mostly about literature and life on this blog, I am off much of the day running a boutique marketing communications firm. Sometimes this means that I'm strategizing with executives about corporate culture and intra-office dialogue. Sometimes it means I'm writing corporate magazines, annual reports, histories. Often I'm collaborating with my husband-partner, he being the designer, the artist, the one who knows the magic tricks that convert digital files into type-glossed, image-varnished paper.

My job requires acting, but it also requires listening, and lately, on behalf of St. Christopher's Foundation for Children, a truly wonderful organization, I've been listening to the leaders of North Philadelphia initiatives such as SquashSmarts and Centro Nuevo Creacion talk about the work they are doing, child by child, to make my city a stronger one, and to make the world a better place. I've learned about teens from difficult neighborhoods who have so dedicated themselves to learning and to athletics that they've gone on to such prestigious schools as Haverford College. I've learned about young North Philadelphia kids who have picked up a camera and become true artists—documenting their world, finding the color between the cracks.

http://www.scfchildren.org/

http://www.centronueva.org/

http://www.squashsmarts.org/

I write about this today on my blog, for sometimes we all need a reminder that, in the midst of a mud-slinging campaign and uncontrollable weather, in the midst of terrible losses, there are those out there who go to work each day with the ambition, the intention, of making something right. Of letting bright red seeds fall where they may.

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