M

y oldest child, Yechiel, was born 29 years ago with clubfoot, a condition in which the feet are turned inward and downward.

Although this is a relatively minor and reparable birth defect, as a first-time mother, I found the diagnosis devastating and the aftermath difficult to handle. I was just 21 years old, and instead of being pampered as a kimpeturin, I found myself running from one doctor to another and busy getting my newborn’s feet placed in a series of casts and braces. At ten months old, he underwent surgery, which was followed by more casts and braces.

Yechiel was actually a yearned-for baby, as my first pregnancy had ended in miscarriage, after which I experienced a longing to become a mother that would persist for the remainder of my childbearing years. But for me, the path to motherhood was strewn with considerable obstacles. Among these, Yechiel’s birth defect was, well, child’s play.

When I was expecting my second child, an ultrasound at the end of the sixth month showed that the baby’s brain had failed to develop. The official diagnosis: severe holoprosencephaly. “This baby is not compatible with life,” was the way the doctor put it. “There’s nothing anyone can do.”

My husband’s rosh yeshivah advised us not to tell anyone about the diagnosis. “The more people that know about it, the less likely that you’ll experience a miraculous yeshuah,” he explained.

For the remainder of the pregnancy, therefore, I had to pretend that everything was normal. “How are you going to cope with another baby?” some well-meaning friends and relatives clucked. “Yechiel isn’t even walking yet!”

It’s not going to be a problem, I thought sadly, as I forced myself to smile in response.

One day, I was sitting in the park with a few other young mothers, and one of them shared her frustration over her difficulty finding the right wallpaper to match her kitchen. “I can’t decide if I should put up blue wallpaper or green wallpaper,” she lamented. “And I already went to three stores, but I couldn’t find anything that matched my dishes!”

You’re getting worked up about wallpaper? I wanted to scream. Be happy you have a healthy baby!

Facing the world and pretending everything was fine while knowing that the baby I was carrying was probably not going to live, was excruciatingly difficult. In the apartment building where we lived, common practice was that when a young couple would make a simchah on Shabbos in the house, men were hosted in one apartment and women in another. When a neighbor I was close with made a shalom zachar and Shabbos bris, it was self-understood that I’d offer my apartment. As part-hostess, I was involved in many of the preparations for the simchah, which was an exquisite form of torture. “Shiffy, you’re next!” several of my neighbors commented innocently.

I was the next one in the building to give birth — to a baby girl who was missing most of her brain, whose face was deformed, and who suffered seizures from day one. She wasn’t expected to survive her first day, and certainly not her first week, but to the surprise of the doctors, she did. We named her Chaya.

Now the question was what to do with her. Our pediatrician advised that we not feed or hydrate her.

I was horrified. “Are you saying I should kill my daughter?”

“No,” he replied. “I’m just saying you shouldn’t feed her. She’s missing most of her brain anyway, so she can’t feel pain or hunger.”

My husband, Akiva, fully agreed that depriving our baby of nutrition or hydration was out of the question. But with little Chaya having seizures regularly, in addition to all her other medical issues, there was no way we could bring her home.

Leah, a representative of the local bikur cholim who had helped us when we were dealing with Yechiel’s clubfoot, was an invaluable resource for us this time as well, giving us much-needed chizuk as well as practical advice. She recommended a facility just outside our city where Chaya could receive quality round-the-clock care, and that’s where we put her.

From then on, we’d receive frequent phone calls from the facility staff telling us that they weren’t sure whether Chaya would survive the night. Each time this happened, Akiva and I would race over to the facility, often bringing little Yechiel along, and spend the night with Chaya. This went on for nine months, until Chaya breathed her last.

No cause, or even a possible factor, was ever found for Chaya’s condition, although my family members certainly tried to isolate one. One sister-in-law, in particular, grilled me for information: What did you do in your first month of pregnancy? Your second month? Your third month? Did you ever drink alcohol? What medications did you take? Did you exterminate your apartment? Paint your walls?

Thankfully, I hadn’t done any of these no-no’s. Instead of feeling guilt ridden, therefore, Akiva and I were able to recognize that this was simply a gezeirah from Shamayim, and that Hashem had chosen us, for whatever reason, to bring this pure neshamah into the world and help it accomplish whatever tikkun it needed.

When our next child, Tehila, was born perfectly healthy, our joy knew no bounds.

“Shiffy, you can’t imagine how excited your husband was when he came home from the hospital with the good news,” my neighbors told me afterward. “We’ve never seen such simchah.”

From the time Chaya passed away until Tehila was born, I couldn’t bear to look at little girls’ clothing. Any time I’d walk into a clothing store, I’d turn my face away from the little dresses and baby-girl outfits. Now I could finally walk into a children’s clothing store without feeling my heart contort every time I saw anything pink.

Around this time, a rebbetzin I was close to from seminary, to whom I had turned for chizuk when Chaya was born, called me to ask if I could speak to another alumna in a different city who had just given birth to a stillborn child. Today, there are frum organizations and support groups that help people going through these challenges, but back then there were no formal resources in the community, and the rebbetzin thought that this newly bereaved mother would benefit from speaking to me.

This mother and I were in contact for several months, during which we spoke on the phone and exchanged letters containing various ideas we had heard that gave us chizuk.

My next pregnancy went smoothly — until the ninth month, when a routine checkup revealed that the baby had died. At my previous appointment a week earlier, everything had been fine, but now, the doctor informed me sadly, there was no longer a heartbeat.

We were devastated. First Chaya, and now this?

This time, there was no hope of a yeshuah, and therefore no reason to hide the fact that I was carrying a stillborn. On the contrary, I wanted everyone to know, so that I wouldn’t have to deal with typical questions like, “How much longer do you have?”

In the midst of my grief, I couldn’t help but recognize the Hashgachah pratis involved. Having extended myself to comfort another mother of a stillborn baby, I was able to use my very own words to comfort myself.

One particular idea I had shared with this mother echoed in my mind: “The purpose of childbearing is to bring Hashem’s neshamos into the world. When you give birth to a healthy baby, you have pleasure, too, but when you give birth to a stillborn, or to a child who’s not viable, like my Chaya, you’re doing it completely l’Sheim Shamayim.”

My doctor did not want to induce labor, which meant that I had to carry the pregnancy until the end. When I suffered sciatica pain, and the various other aches and pains of late pregnancy, I told Hashem, This pain is for Your sake — I’m not going to have anything from it. And I checked into the hospital to give birth knowing that this baby was purely Hashem’s.

After leaving the hospital empty-handed, I went and bought a huge set of Lego. For the next few weeks, I spent hours every day on the floor with Yechiel and Tehila building towers and trucks out of Lego. Honestly, the Lego wasn’t for them — it was for me. With every Lego brick I built, I reminded myself that I had two beautiful children and much to look forward to. Life will go on, I told myself. Life will go on.

I turned my focus to Yechiel and Tehila, giving them supper on time, reading them books, and carrying on with our bedtime routine. Akiva and I didn’t grieve openly until after they were asleep.

My newly married sister came for a few days to help with the kids and pamper me, which I greatly appreciated. What I didn’t appreciate was when people tried to comfort me by saying, “This child was not meant to be, but don’t worry, you’ll have other babies.” At the time, I didn’t find that comforting at all.

I was working as a teacher then, and a week and a half after the birth, I called my principal to inform her that I was ready to return to work. With no baby to care for, I felt that resuming my regular schedule would be the best way to propel myself past the grief of losing yet another baby. What else should I do, sit home and cry all day?

The principal agreed, but then she called back to say that some of my students’ parents were worried that I’d pass out in class, and they wanted me to get medical clearance before returning to school. I called my doctor, who gave me the go-ahead, and two weeks after the stillbirth, I was back teaching Chumash, Navi, and parshah to my young students.

Shortly afterward, we moved to a different city, where Akiva started a new job and we bought our first house. In our new community, no one knew about the two babies we had lost, and I saw no reason to tell anyone.

Our newly purchased house needed some repairs, including replacing the peeling wallpaper in the kitchen. I went out to shop for wallpaper, but I didn’t find anything suitable in the local store, and the worker I had hired to fix up the kitchen was coming that afternoon. This is impossible, I thought to myself. My kitchen is disgusting, and I can’t even find wallpaper!

Suddenly, I remembered the young mother in the park complaining about how hard it was to find wallpaper for her apartment, and how silly and even galling her frustration had seemed at the time. I, of all people, should know better than to get worked up about wallpaper! I chided myself. And in an instant, the frustration disappeared.

Having experienced two major losses by the time we were in our mid-twenties, Akiva and I would often remind each other that most of the issues in day-to-day life weren’t worth getting upset about. “I’m healthy, you’re healthy, the kids are healthy,” Akiva would say. “What else really matters?”

Throughout my next pregnancy, I was a nervous wreck, as was Akiva. If he ever saw me running up the stairs, or lifting anything slightly heavy — even a sack of potatoes — he would insist that I take it easy. “What are you doing?” he’d cry out. Although the memory of our losses dulled somewhat with time, and was eased with the birth of additional children, I considered it a miracle each time a pregnancy ended in a mazel tov. When I went for ultrasounds during pregnancy, I’d say, “I don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl. Just tell me the baby’s healthy!”

In the years that followed, we were blessed with another six children — all healthy, baruch Hashem. Although initially I did not think that having additional children would replace the ones we lost, the fact was that with each child born, our pain over the ones who didn’t survive did fade.

The experience of losing two babies served to intensify my yearning for children, and even as I reached an age when most women are no longer having children, I still begged Hashem for another baby. And indeed, four years ago, at the age of 46, when I was already a grandmother, I was blessed with a bas zekunim.

That little girl, Ahuva, howled nonstop for the first four months of her life, but by then I was far, far beyond getting bent out of shape from a colicky baby. Was I tired? Yes. Did I have other things to do besides rock and soothe a newborn all day and all night? You bet. But was there anything in the world I’d rather have been doing? Absolutely not.

Most women my age — 50 — would probably find it difficult to cope with a preschooler at this stage in life, while juggling married children, kids in shidduchim, teenagers, and grandkids. But for me the difficulties of motherhood have always been dwarfed by the joy and privilege of being able to care for and raise my children. Had I not lost two babies early in my mothering career, I, too, probably would have complained about the typical things mothers gripe about: homework, PTA, car pool, tuition, what to make for supper….

On Shabbos afternoon, I host all the neighborhood kids for Shabbos party, while their mothers get some much-needed rest. I wouldn’t mind a nap myself, but for me it’s much more rewarding to spend time with my daughter. I’m not superhuman; I just have an enhanced appreciation of motherhood, born of the ever-present awareness that each child is a gift that could easily have slipped away.

Looking at the pictures hanging on my wall of the weddings of my three oldest children, you would never imagine what obstacles Akiva and I encountered on our journey to parenthood. All you’d see is a large family of beautiful, healthy children and two beaming parents.

Few people in our community are even aware of what we went through all those years ago. Yet to this day, when I’m asked how many children I have, I still have to fight the urge to say ten. If I say eight, which is the number of living children I have, I feel that I’m betraying the memory of the two babies I buried, who still occupy a place in my heart.

I do say eight, obviously — and each time I say that, I am filled with wonder anew at the fact that I’ve been blessed with eight children. What riches! But the two I lost are a big part of those riches, because it’s only thanks to them that I’m able to fully appreciate the others.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 674)