September 25, 2026 — Love Anderson
Two years ago this week, when the rain finally slowed and the size of what had happened started to come clear, I want to tell you what I was actually thinking about. It was not kits, or formula, or policy. It was my mama.
My mother lives in Black Mountain. My sister lives in Asheville. In the first hours after the storm, my sister drove over to my mom’s house and got word out to me that she was safe, and I let myself breathe. And then, for three days, my mother went silent. Her texts stopped coming. My sister had to evacuate to Atlanta. And in that silence, I will be honest with you, it was very hard to think about anyone else’s mother.
Because here is what almost no one tells you about a disaster. You are asked to help other people while you are terrified about your own.
We had the call with the North Carolina Breastfeeding Coalition. We started organizing, dropping supplies where families in Western North Carolina were begging for help, and the entire time, underneath every sentence I said about other people’s babies, I was thinking about your babies. One day someone called to ask if I needed anything. It had been so long since I had heard from my mom that I had just texted her to say that if I did not hear back within twenty-four hours, I was sending someone to go check on her. So when that person asked me what I needed, I did not need supplies, or a spreadsheet, or a plan. I needed someone to go check on my mother.
She is fine. I want to say that plainly, because she is a strong woman, the same as me, and she would want me to say it. It turned out she could see every one of my messages. She simply could not get one back out. She grew up in a house with a cistern and an outhouse. She had ninety days of her medication on hand. Logistically, my mother was never in danger.
But emotionally, she has never been quite the same, and I do not think she will be for a while. Black Mountain is where she retired. It is where the love of her life is buried, on land she loves. That land is scarred now, and her town is not the town it was. There was a brightness in my mother that the flood dulled. The land, the community, the people out there may take five years to come back, and maybe another five after that. When I picture the storm, I do not only picture washed-out roads. I picture the light gone dim in my mother.
And here is the thing I need you to carry into the rest of this story. My mother was safe, prepared, and three hours away from me. If the not-knowing did that to me, imagine the mother still up in the mountains with a five-day-old baby, no clean water, and no way to reach a single soul.
For those first hours, I made the mistake I now know none of us must ever make again. I assumed someone else had the babies handled. I thought WIC had a plan. I thought the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services had a plan. I thought Save the Children, or the American Red Cross, or FEMA had long ago worked out how you feed an infant when a whole region loses clean water. As I would put it later, I honestly believed that somebody had already figured out how to deal with infant feeding in an emergency.
They had not. What existed was a guideline. The CDC has real, sound guidance on infant feeding in emergencies. What did not exist was a single person, or agency, or office whose job it was to carry that guidance into a shelter and put it into a mother’s hands. The instructions were sitting on a shelf, and no one had been assigned to open the book.
I found that out the way you find out a floor is missing. I stepped onto it. Around noon in those first days, one of our board members, an IBCLC named Brandi who was already inside the disaster zone, called me. She did not ask whether we could help. She said, “Love, I need you to send me twenty IBCLCs or infant feeding specialists tomorrow.” And I stood in my kitchen, three hours away, my own kids fighting a stomach virus, my mother still not answering, and I understood that the somebody I had been waiting for was going to have to be us.
The stories that came down out of the mountains are the reason I will never make that assumption again. Reporters who made it into the impact area described families choosing, in their words, whether to feed their babies or flush their toilets. Lactation consultants got on horses and ATVs and hiked up washed-out roads to reach a single home with a single baby inside. The pediatric practices that still had their doors open began seeing exactly what you would predict when clean water disappears,: a rise in infants with diarrheal illness, the very thing that kills babies in emergencies the world over. Formula-fed babies were the most at risk of all, because formula is only ever as safe as the water you mix it with, and there was no safe water for weeks.
There is one story from those first days that I have never been able to set down, and I want to tell it to you carefully, because I do not know how it ends. A father got out of his flooding house carrying his baby and his toddler. His wife was right behind him. She did not make it out of the house. I never reached that family, and I cannot tell you for certain what became of her. What I can tell you is that in a matter of seconds a family was broken in two, and that somewhere in the middle of that unimaginable morning there was still a baby who needed to be fed.
The formula itself became one of the hardest lessons. Kind people all over the country did the thing that feels obviously good. They bought up formula and shipped it toward the disaster. So much of it that we actually ran out of formula for the families I serve back home in Durham. And a heartbreaking amount of what arrived out west ended up in a landfill, because it had been donated close to its expiration date, or left in a hot car, or frozen and thawed until it was no longer safe to give a baby. One of the least intuitive truths of this whole field is that a mountain of donated formula is not the same thing as a fed baby, and can sometimes make things worse.
I would love to tell you that we knew what we were doing in those first days. We did not. We were, as we said to each other a hundred times that fall, building the airplane while we were flying it. The communication lines were so broken that information reached us garbled and frightening, and in the fog you came to believe things that later turned out not to be true, and you acted anyway, because a baby cannot wait for you to be certain.
What I want to leave you with, on this anniversary, is not the water. It is the silence underneath it. In one of the worst natural disasters in our state’s history, with the entire machinery of emergency response spinning up, the National Guard and FEMA and the Red Cross and mutual aid pouring in from all over the country, there was no one whose job it was to make sure the babies were safely fed. Not because anyone was cruel. Because in the whole architecture of how this country answers a disaster, that job had simply never been given to anyone.
So we started doing it ourselves. That is the next part of the story, and it is the part where I learned how unprepared every one of us was, and how much we could do anyway.
[Next: Post 3, Building the Plane While Flying It.]