The Unexpected Resignation (and more about NICU Alumni)

Over the past 24 months, we have gone through several changes in our family. I have posted some, but have wanted to write a little bit more about all of it and now that I have, it has probably turned into one of the longest posts I’ve ever written…

If you remember this update, I shared that after I went back to work when my parental leave with Felicity ended in mid-2019, I started to sense that I no longer wanted to remain in my line of work. One evening, we were out for a walk in our neighborhood, and Rob looked at me and said, if money was no object, what would you want to do? I thought about our NICU experiences with the girls, and felt like I could see myself talking to families as they transitioned from the NICU and tried to navigate life in those early days while finding support and establishing new rhythms. I imagined maybe even getting to speak with local and non local NICUs. I thought about how I could share our family’s experience to help other families feel better equipped as they embarked on the next season. I know that the end of the NICU journey is really the beginning of something that can be quite complicated and feel overwhelming and lonely. There was a stirring in my heart and mind and I began keeping notes anytime a new thought or idea about my vision for this nonprofit came to mind.

Logistically speaking my job had our healthcare benefits, and those are pretty important no matter what your family dynamic is, so we knew we needed to maintain them especially since both of our kiddos have complex medical histories. While I kept dreaming about one day starting a nonprofit, and even decided to name it NICU Alumni; by early 2020 I thought that for the time being it would be smarter to just start looking for a new job in the same industry. I was hoping to make my transition official around March 2021.

I had just started networking, and having informal interviews expressing my interest in considering the next steps in my career when the pandemic started.

In March of 2020 our support system disappeared instantly, we watched our business, Huddle Up NYC shrink after years of continued growth, and we began to feel led to leave our beloved community in NYC. All of that was so hard… and while we did feel heartache, we had peace and knew that we were making the right decision. I continued to work supporting my team in NYC remotely from Miami, but all thoughts of changing roles were put on hold.

About a month after moving down, Rob was hired to work at a charter school on the high school football team, and with that, Lucie was also able to gain admission (up until that point she was about the 120th student on the ever growing waiting list). Woo!

But here’s the cool part - our niece had already been going to that school for about three or four years. When we first heard about it while still in NYC, we thought the curriculum sounded really interesting and thought Lucie would benefit from an environment like that. I did some research in the NYC area and at that time there were a few schools in the South Bronx that followed that curriculum, so I even joked with Rob and wondered, should we think about moving to the South Bronx? Spoiler Alert: We didn’t move to the South Bronx, lol. And now, Lucie was not only going to go to a school like her cousin’s, she was going to go to the same exact school as her cousin.

But then here’s the REALLY cool part - in NYC she had already completed kindergarten, (she had to start as a four year old due to the birthday registration rules). This is something that I had always been pretty uncomfortable with, especially since she should have been born well past the birthday registration deadline. She had gone through years of early intervention to help her development be more in line with her peers, and I didn’t want her to lose that momentum by starting kindergarten as a four year old. But pushing back on the NYCDOE would likely result in high legal costs and little resolution, so I had resigned to the rule and she enrolled in kindergarten in NYC. One year later, upon registering her at the new school in Florida we shared that she had already attended kindergarten. They asked for her date of birth and when I told them, they realized that she was still going to be five at the start of the school year so they said, actually go ahead and enroll in kindergarten. I was stunned and amazed that something that had been bothering me in the back of my mind for such a long time was resolved in a matter of minutes. The fact that Rob was able to get back to coaching part-time after four months of not working due to the pandemic made it all that much sweeter.

Isn’t this post supposed to be about me resigning and starting a nonprofit? I promise I’m getting there, but I wanted to share this too, because all of these affirmations were so encouraging to us especially during those early days in our move when the ache of leaving NYC was still pretty fresh.

And so now it was the fall of 2020. On the third day of school, very down to the wire, Lucie officially started kindergarten (again) and had the most amazing teacher we could have ever asked for. She helped usher Lucie through all of these transitions with tenderness and love. Lucie still has some challenges with focus and keeping up with the pace sometimes, but she fully “outgrew” the additional intervention she had been receiving in NYC and as of to today, she is now in a general education first grade class and no longer has ANY intervention. HUGE!

Meanwhile, it was around that time that we started actively looking for houses. If you read the post about our “House Story”, I shared that we also received Felicity’s official diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy. Since these two huge updates occurred during the same time in the process of our transition from NYC to Miami they will forever be interwoven. In that post I also alluded to how receiving her diagnosis brought about yet another transition for us, this time related to our careers.

Rob was working on reviving Huddle Up NYC remotely from Miami, and loving his part-time coaching role at the school. I was spending as much time working at my job as I was tirelessly trying to advocate for Felicity to get her back to the level of support she had been receiving in NYC - support and therapy she desperately needed. I started to not just think about eventually looking for a new job in the same industry, but perhaps resigning completely for a season. I had never thought of doing something like that. How would that even work? Wouldn’t it be great if Rob could just start working full time at the school? Then we could have our healthcare benefits through his role, I could resign, help get us more settled in Miami, help with Huddle Up, and focus full time on trying to gain more traction for Felicity’s services.

As we started to consider this idea more and more, it became clear that it was something we really wanted to pursue. Conversations about what this could potentially look like started with the school at the end of November, but with the holidays approaching we didn’t get many updates until well into January. Each day with no answer felt like it stretched for ages. Looking back it is unbelievable to think that only two months would go by before Rob actually did receive a full-time offer (in the middle of the school year) to join the school’s staff full-time. The night he got the official offer, was also our very first night in our house since we didn't move in until January 2021! The next day, I resigned from my job.

I knew it was the right decision to resign, but the moment after I spoke with my boss, instead of the relief and excitement I was hoping to feel, I cried and was filled with doubts. Has that ever happened to you? Thankfully, I didn’t feel that way for long, and I became more confident as each day of the final countdown at my job began. Looking back to 2019, like I mentioned, we set the goal for me to make my job switch by March of 2021, and that’s exactly when it happened - my last day ended up being March 1st. When I started to think about making a career transition, I thought it would be to start a nonprofit, or to switch to a new job in the same industry. I didn’t think it would end up that I would resign from the workforce entirely! It is wild and wonderful to see how that ended up coming to fruition even though it was in a completely different way than anything I could have envisioned.

I knew that for the next season, what I wanted to do more than anything was to focus on setting Felicity up with additional therapy services. She was already enrolled at a wonderful Therapy Center, but was still receiving the very minimum amount of therapy. I got to work. I made calls. I filled in applications. I provided parent interviews. I scheduled evaluations. I filled in more applications, and made more calls. A coworker of Rob’s introduced us to someone in Tallahassee which opened the door for me to learn more about a program that we could get Felieicty enrolled in for additional services. It took five months to get through that program’s process, but now Felicity is receiving the amount of therapy she really needs and we are so incredibly thankful. Pray that the funding for this program doesn’t end!

In the spring of 2021, a friend of mine introduced me to a family member of hers who lives in Orlando and works as an advocate. She understood how difficult it can be to navigate getting services for your child and told me about a conference we should think about attending called The Family Cafe (an organization that provides individuals with disabilities and their families opportunities to connect, empower each other, and learn about resources). We attended the conference in June, and it was incredibly helpful. As you know, we were not as versed in all of the resources available in FL, and at the conference, there was so much information easily available. If I had to search for that all on my own, it would have taken much longer to find and understand. It was definitely overwhelming at times too. It struck me though, that while I was continuing to focus on advocating for Felicity, so much of what I was learning about overlapped with my vision for NICU Alumni. At the conference, I found out about an organization called Partners in Policymaking (a leadership training program that prepares you to be an effective advocate at the local, state, and federal levels). I applied to their 6 month program and was accepted. I started the training last September and graduated in February of 2022.

While participating in that advocacy training I really started taking active steps towards launching NICU Alumni. I was overwhelmed with how to actually get started, but as I shared about the training with family members and loved ones, and told them my reason for enrolling was to help me not just support Felicity, but others like her, they encouraged me to keep moving forward. My incredibly supportive uncle helped NICU Alumni become incorporated and found out what I needed to do to apply to become tax-exempt. Since we are located in South Florida, NICU Alumni will provide some local support, but our main focus will be to develop online tools such as a resourceful website, and a trusted podcast. I’d love for you to to follow us, you can find us on instagram, and we are slowly adding meaningful resources to the NICU Alumni website. I’m excited to also share that in March, NICU Alumni received an official 501c3 status so we are able to apply for grants and accept tax-exempt donations through the website, via zelle, via Facebook, via Instagram, and good old-fashioned check! All donations will go directly to NICU Alumni’s mission of supporting families navigating life after the NICU. Hooray! I am so thankful! (Which reminds me: If you, or someone you know, is interested in volunteering with NICU Alumni as we get started, we are looking for help with grant applications, bookkeeping and social media. Reach out and let me know!)

If you’ve read this far - thank you! I have been wanting to get the fullness of these updates all written out because it really has been SO MUCH. We’re still going “through it” in a lot of ways. But it’s in the looking back, and in the remembering, that we get to marvel at the way things have (or haven’t) worked out, we get to see how some things were set in motion before we even realized it, and how all of it has helped us grow as we wait during new seasons. If you’re tempted to think, “Wow, that all worked out so perfectly”… I hesitate to categorize it that way, because it was (and still is) so hard at times. Saying it worked out perfectly somehow minimizes the times it has felt really hard and so trying. How would I say it? I don’t know… maybe something like, “We trusted God, and in time we have seen how He worked so many things out for our good.” At least that’s where I’d start.

Over the last two years we have made decisions that we felt were the right choices but were a mix of: one-part “overwhelming peace and certainty”, one-part “do I really have to let this go?”, one-part “close your eyes and take a step in faith”, and one-part, “eeeek”!

I didn’t do it much, but when I would sit and journal about how some of this was starting to unfold, I would think to myself, I want to share this on the blog one day (when I’m ready). Even the hard parts. Maybe it will be an encouragement to others. And I hope that it has been.

Much love,

Los Hicksons