By: Sarah Cedonis, Baltimore Corps Fellow

When the deputy director of Maternal and Child Health stopped by my desk and asked if I had any interest in helping deliver cribs to new mothers, I thought I’d get the chance to better understand one of the city health department’s most vibrant programs, B’More for Healthy Babies. I didn’t realize, at the time, that I would also get the chance to better understand some of the city’s most vibrant people: its new mothers and their babies.

Through a partnership between Baltimore City Health Department and Health Care Access Maryland, the B’More for Healthy Babies Safe Sleep campaign aims to make sure that every baby in Baltimore is sleeping safely. Safe sleep means, as per the “ABCs” taught in hospitals citywide: Alone, on his or her Back, and in a Crib.

It is with this “C” that BCHD and HCAM intervene: for any mom leaving the hospital who reports she does not have a crib at home for her baby to sleep in, HCAM and BCHD offer to provide one. This is where I, personally, happily, stepped in.

Over the course of the summer (late June through early September) I had the pleasure of meeting nearly 50 mothers across the city. These moms came from all different walks of life, and from just about every neighborhood. Some spoke different languages; some were very young and some much older. Some were having their first child, others their fifth. Some were working full time jobs, some were at home, some were in school. Some had furniture. Some did not. Some had full cabinets and pantries. Some did not. Some had partners or parents to help them out. Some did not.

What everyone had though, amid all these differences, was just the same: each mom had a new baby. Each mom had a new baby that she loved.

In the oft-divided city we live in, it is all together too easy to focus on what we do not have in common. Living in Federal Hill seems so different than Cherry Hill; Morrell Park immensely different than Roland Park. Living in housing projects, we think, must be so different than living in our own house, or living off food stamps altogether different than shopping at Whole Foods. We are a city of neighborhoods, certainly, but neighborhoods that we assume are each so very different, because of who lives there, and how they live.

What I had the privilege to witness as I tread all different doorsteps across Baltimore, was that we have so much more in common, from our very start, than we realize. At our start, at our beginnings, we are fragile, perfect, fussy, beautiful little humans, thrust by chance into our place and space in the city. We all at our start had to rely, wholly and entirely, on the loving hands of someone else.

It seems like an important time in Baltimore to remember this, to carefully consider how much we need look after and provide for one another, and for our most vulnerable, be it babies, or those experiencing homelessness, be it substance abusers, or the elderly, be it school children or citizens returning from incarceration. One of the Health Department’s main priorities right now is “care for the city’s most vulnerable,” and programs like B’More for Healthy Babies are among many making steadfast and continued effort to provide this critical care.

Though I saw 50 very different mothers in my crib-toting-travels, I saw 50 babies all more or less the same: being held proudly, gently, joyfully, and above all, lovingly, by their moms. It is important—essential, even—to take note of these mothers, of the tenderness in their eyes as they lay babies into sturdy new cribs. We hope to give their babies something secure, a safe place to sleep, but ultimately, we must be thinking of how to build around them a city, full of different people and neighborhoods, that is a safe and secure place to grow up.

For more about the Safe Sleep program, please see: http://healthybabiesbaltimore.com/our-initiatives/safe-sleep