Now that Nourishing Resilience is over, I feel sad. I still feel wounded, still hurt, still carrying the trauma of where all this began. And I feel not done. The hurricane was so horrible that I do not want it to happen to anyone else, and I still see, every day, how grossly unprepared we are as a country. I am supposed to be celebrating an ending, and what I mostly see is how much work is left.
I think I was supposed to sit down and write something happy and proud, and instead I have spent a week doing anything else. I lost whole days to the website and the drive, digging through everything we made, trying to get all of it out into the world, because when we finished the final session, when we posted the last of the homework and put out everything we had, there was still so much of the story that had not been told. We did so much work. We did so much work that it simply does not fit into a video series.
And here is the other true thing, sitting right beside that one, because both are allowed to be true at once. I am so proud of what we produced. Nourishing Resilience turned out bigger and better and more successful than I ever imagined it would be. When we started, most of our team thought we might reach fifty or a hundred people. More than seven hundred of you registered and came and stayed. What we built together is a toolkit for getting a community started in a way that is actually achievable, not a counsel of perfection but a place to begin, and I know from the hardest possible experience that a place to begin is the thing that saves lives.
The series ends with our policy work, and I keep thinking about why that is the right ending. Because telling the story of what breastfeeding coalitions can do, what ordinary people can do, is only the beginning. We need federal policy change. We need state policy change. We need local policy change. And for the first time, we have the people to fight for all three. There are champions now, planted all over the United States, growing and ready. That is what this series actually made. Not videos. Champions.
I want to tell you what success in this work looks like, because it is the strangest thing about it. Success is invisible. If we do our jobs, the next disaster’s worst stories simply do not happen, and nobody will ever know. You cannot see the family that did not lose a baby. You cannot see the child who did not develop an eating trauma, the toddler who did not end up with delays, the mother who was not left alone in a shelter with no one whose job it was to help her. Success just looks like families having their babies and loving them and having joy. It looks like the pain of parenting being only the ordinary, holy pain of raising a human, with room to actually parent instead of fighting for logistics. It looks like mothers who are held, communities that are connected, providers who know where every resource lives. Nobody gives out awards for the catastrophe that did not occur. We do this work anyway, on purpose, for people who will never know our names. That is the job.
And how do I feel, really, now that it is over? I feel like this. There are now more than seven hundred people I can call in the middle of the night when something bad happens. I keep reaching for a word for that and rejecting the military ones, because an army is not what we built. What we built is warmer than that. It is threads.
A while back I wrote that everyone has a thread, and that the great national plans and blueprints and frameworks are not rival documents but threads in one cloth. (Read more) I believe that more now than when I wrote it. Because this work started with destruction, with a storm that tore the fabric of a whole region, and it is ending with construction. Thread by thread, hand by hand, we are weaving the thing I have started to think of as a cloak of power, a warm garment that wraps safety around every family, every provider, every institution, every baby. So that the very first needs of our tiniest humans, the ones who will one day be running this country, are protected. So that when those babies grow up and have babies of their own, what rains down through the generations is not trauma. It is wellness. It is support. It is being held.
When Helene fell, the ground was already saturated. Days of rain had soaked the mountains before the storm ever arrived, and that is why the water went where it went. I think about that saturated ground all the time now, because it taught me how transformation actually works. Nothing about that week was sudden. The flood was just the last rain on ground that was already full. So here is my hope, now that seven hundred of you are out there, trained and connected and ready. I hope we are the next saturation. I hope we rain down change on this country until the ground of it is soaked through, until policy gives way the way a hillside gives way, and the landscape of how America treats its babies is transformed into something more beautiful for the generations coming after us.
Because a true breastfeeding family friendly community is not really about breastfeeding. It is a community where families feel safe to be vulnerable in public. Where every member, from the newest baby through the parents through the elderly, all the way to our very last breath, is safe to need things, out loud, among neighbors. That is what the SAFE team was defending in the mud. That is what Nourishing Resilience was teaching. And that is the work I am so proud to continue, implementing the ten steps to a breastfeeding family friendly community through the lens of infant and young child feeding in emergencies, one community at a time.
To the more than seven hundred of you: I am excited to stop teaching and watch you get to work. You know the story now. You know what happened in Western North Carolina, and before that in Puerto Rico, and before that in every place the water rose or the flames came and no one had planned for the babies. You each came here holding a thread.
And to everyone else, everyone who keeps hearing me talk about a storm and a story: starting this month, I am going to tell it to you. All of it, one post a month, for as long as it takes to tell it true. From the first drops of rain on saturated ground, through the flood, through the winter we almost closed, to the rooms in Washington where I learned that nobody in this country owns the job of feeding babies in a disaster. It is the story of how a group of volunteers became the thing America forgot to build, and it is a call to make sure no one ever has to build it in the rain again. It begins in two weeks, with a post called The Calm Before the Storm.
Celebrate this whole tapestry with me. And then come help us weave.