It's times like these when differences get put aside

Saturday morning, after rooming in with Ella (staying the night), I was down in the cafeteria getting breakfast. As I was making my coffee, there was a lady beside me who had beautiful, long, thick, red hair and I just had to compliment her on it. We started talking and found out that we both had babies in the NICU. I asked her if  her baby had been born prematurely. With tears in her eyes, she told me that when her full term son was 7 days old, they discovered that he had a heart defect and he was air lifted from Pine City to Children's Hospital. I could tell by how she was talking about it that their night had been very much like our night when Ella was 4 days old. She was crying and I reached over and hugged her tightly. She was a stranger, probably 15 years my senior and nothing in common that I knew of but at the moment, we were both one and the same--a mama in desperate need to help their baby but with tied hands. I reassured her that eventually she would be able to talk about all of this without crying. She smiled at me and said thanks. We swapped stories about our babies and how they were doing. I discovered that he was going to have surgery on Tuesday morning (that's tomorrow...we're praying for you baby Malachai!!) and that he was the youngest of 7 children. This mama, whose name I found out the next day is Leslie, probably is completely and totally different then I am. If we were to run into each other on the street,we probably wouldn't have talked much less embraced and bonded but in this moment, all of those walls were dropped and we came together, all differences aside, and we were one and the same. 

Today, Shane and I were talking about Leslie and her family and how amazing it was that situations like this just shove all differences aside and bring people together. Like I said, Leslie and I would have never bonded but after this, even if we never see each other again, we will have a small special place in each others hearts as the woman who bonded with the other over a cup of bad coffee on that Saturday morning.