It was a long, exhausting ordeal, mired in the depressing cocktail of emotions and thoughts swirling through my mind. Would the baby be all right? How was I going to do this alone, with just my husband and no family? How could this be happening three months early? Disbelief, anxiety, an abject sense of failure, terror…. I cried through the labor, unable to feel the excitement of welcoming my first child.

“It’s normal for a baby this premature not to make a sound when he’s born,” the nurses told me, but their words barely penetrated my mental fog.

As soon as my fragile, silent son entered the world, he was whisked into an incubator and rushed to the NICU. I barely caught a glimpse of my baby, and at that moment, I didn’t even want to. I could barely process the idea that I had just given birth, and it took an hour until I stopped trembling from the shock of the experience. I was a mother? I had a baby?

For the first 24 hours — the most crucial time in a preemie’s life — no one would tell me anything about my baby’s state of health. It was a wait-and-see approach, when the threads of life were so tenuous, and we all held our breath. But at last, I heard the news. His breathing wasn’t good, so he was receiving oxygen. He was less than three pounds.

Even so, “Eizeh gibor!” the nurse exclaimed. She said he looked healthy, despite his issues. She could tell he was a fighter.

Could I see him? Touch him?

I could see him soon, but I couldn’t touch my baby for 72 hours. And the doctor wanted to meet with us the next day. I spent a sleepless night longing to see my child and terrified of what the doctor would tell us.

The doctor’s visit was a complete anticlimax — she explained that it was a routine visit to see how we were doing, to share news about my son, and to prepare me for the sight of my baby.

Nothing she said could have prepared me.

Still weak from the long, traumatic birth, I entered the NICU, silent except for the eerie hum of machines, beeping apparatuses, and glowing numbers on countless screens. My legs trembled at the plastic bubble of the incubator, the still, tiny body inside. I gazed at my “gibor,” and my mouth went dry. That pale doll, dwarfed by the monitors and tubes and wires, couldn’t be my baby.

“Take me out,” I whispered hoarsely. “I think I’m going to faint.”

Sitting outside on a hard plastic chair, I took deep breaths and tried to calm down.

Slowly, the knowledge trickled into my post-birth mind: That little baby was mine, and I needed to be there for him, even though I was terrified. I would come back. Tomorrow.

I did. After three days, the NICU nurses let me hold him, since skin-to-skin contact is healing for preemies. When the featherlight body snuggled in my arms, I was surprised at my fierce surge of love. Nestling him closer, gazing at him through a haze of tears, I wondered how I could care for something so weak. His sticklike fingers, splayed on my sweater, reminded me of noodles, I thought with a touch of hysteria.

Could anyone be ready for this? What was normal? What was serious? Everything sounded serious. Every word of medical jargon was a harbinger of doom. Every moment was anxiety, pulling my stomach into knots and hijacking my mind.

“He has bleeding in the brain,” one doctor informed me. I was terrified until a kind nurse reassured me that this was common in preemies, since their blood vessels are so fragile. If the amount of blood was small, the baby would be fine. Baruch Hashem, the bleed stayed small and didn’t last.

I watched these tiny humans fighting for their lives and felt so helpless. I saw babies who were intubated, babies who couldn’t gain weight, babies who couldn’t breathe, and babies who wouldn’t thrive, and I knew that every moment with my son was a gift from Hashem. Every tiny setback made the road to a normal life with a baby at home seem even farther away. One step forward, two steps back. The NICU state was all-consuming.

But it was time for me to leave.

As soon as I was discharged, the real craziness began. I plunged into the task of mothering my little baby. When I was home, I wanted to be in the hospital: What was happening in the NICU? And when I was in the hospital, I longed for the warmth of home, for rooms with no machines, no screens that I was learning to interpret with uncanny precision, and no medical jargon. After endless hours holding my baby, I would rush home, my very bones aching with fatigue, sometimes falling into bed before I could eat anything.

I pushed myself to the limit and then beyond, but I was too shy to ask for help, even though I sometimes went to bed hungry. Who had time to prepare food, or even think about it? On the nights when a kind neighbor or friend dropped off a warm meal, it meant strength. Love. The ability to care for my baby for another day. The warmth of someone who cared made up for intrusive questions and comments that made me want to cry with rage — and in my sensitive, hormonal state, everything triggered me.

“How much did he weigh?” was the favorite question, closely followed by, “Are you nursing?” and as time passed, “Is he smiling yet?”

I didn’t want any reminders about my son’s doll-like size. Why was it anyone’s business if I was nursing? And no, he wasn’t smiling yet. One of the first things I learned was that the biological age of my baby meant little — it was his adjusted age that mattered. When my baby hit the “biological” two-month milestone, according to his adjusted age, he wasn’t even a newborn. The newborn stage that flashes by the average mother so quickly lasted more than three months for me.

And with every day I spent in the NICU, I felt like it would last forever. Even if I wanted to take a break, only parents and grandparents were allowed into the NICU. With our parents overseas, it was up to me and my husband, over and over, wearily passing each other through the sterile hallways as we went to care for our baby.

But the nurses were incredible.

One day, I was sitting limply next to the incubator, holding my son, when a passing nurse stopped and took a good look at me.

“Motek,” she said gently, “when was the last time you ate?”

I couldn’t even answer her, couldn’t explain the fear that gripped my heart at the thought of leaving him, even for a minute, even for a morsel of food. But she knew.

“Go eat something,” she said softly. “I’ll hold the baby.” I was so touched that my eyes filled, and I could barely mumble a choked thank-you.

But even while I sometimes felt like my world was ending, I was building a new one. A place where we celebrated every feeding, where the day he took a bottle nicely was a burst of blinding relief, where breathing without additional oxygen was news that we eagerly shared with every relative who was following our journey. After slow progress, step by step, over two months after I gave birth, my little boy was almost ready to come home — another miracle, considering that many NICU babies remain for at least three months. The only issue was that his temperature kept dropping, and as long as he couldn’t maintain a steady temperature, the doctors refused to let him go.

But how much longer could we go on like this — the running to the hospital, dashing home to sleep, and then starting the cycle again?

One nurse, seeing how distraught I was by this ongoing setback, called me over.

“Your baby is only wearing the NICU undershirt. Of course, he’s cold! Go to the gift shop downstairs, buy some fuzzy, warm baby clothing, and his temperature will be fine!”

We followed her sage advice and were soon discharged. We were finally a family.

There were still scares and a learning curve to be climbed. In those first few weeks, we dealt with a strange urinary tract infection, a long-delayed bris, the ordinary fatigue that comes from nighttime feedings, and the terrifying realization that we were finally in charge.

As time passed, we grew into our role. We had endless doctor appointments, sometimes twice a week. When my friend’s seven-month-old crawled circles around my not-yet-turning-over baby of the same age, I reminded myself never to compare my son with babies of the same biological age. I was introduced to therapies of all shapes and sizes — the whole alphabet soup of OT, PT, SLP — everything to ensure my baby would suffer as few delays as possible from his very early entry into the world.

A few months later, he smiles all the time, and his high-pitched giggle echoes through my heart. Today, I don’t take these simple things in life for granted anymore, because I know that nothing in life is simple. Many preemies face far rockier challenges. Not every preemie comes home.

And at night, when I watch him sleep, peacefully breathing in a silent crib without extra oxygen or machines, I find myself saying Mizmor Lesodah. Thank You, Hashem. For my child. For the journey. For life.

Please don’t… 

push me to share details. When I want to share what’s going on, I’ll let you know.

I appreciated…

the small tokens that showed me people were thinking of us — a package with a muffin and an iced coffee, a hot supper, a warm email, a little note. Not the questions and comments and unwelcome advice.

I wish…

I’d kept a journal. I felt like I didn’t have the headspace then, but now I wish I’d recorded everything.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 951)