What to Expect When You’re Expecting and None of it Happens Quite Like You Expect

When I first met my doula, she suggested I rename my “birth plan” to my “preferences and wishes.” Sure, I said. Seemed like semantics, but by the time I was lying on an operating table, it was pretty astute foresight.

When I’d walked into the hospital’s emergency room the day before, my preferences and wishes were simple: zero separation from our baby and to immediately initiate breastfeeding. I was pretty clear about what I wanted…until the doctors said “emergency c-section,” “fetal distress,” “low amniotic fluid,” and “IUGR.”

Screw your birth plan when your child’s life is in danger.

My easy, low risk pregnancy suddenly seemed like a distant memory.

What is it they say about the best laid plans?

I felt my water break as the anesthesiologist inserted the needle. Pain shot down my left leg and then, I felt nothing. In an instant, I was paralyzed from my armpits to the tips of my toes.

Minutes passed. The surgical team brought my husband into the OR. He stood behind me as they began the operation while I stared at the ceiling and waited.

Eventually, I felt the pressure they’d warned me about followed by what felt like endless quiet. It was the longest four seconds of my life. Finally, he cried and I could breathe again.

We were officially parents.

The nurse brought him over so that I could see him, even though I couldn’t move a muscle, but the tears of joy came anyway. He was beautiful, our little boy. The little one that we’d waited through nearly six years of marriage to finally meet.

Moments later, my husband and our newborn baby were rushed out of the operating room, just as I started to regain feeling in my toes. It was too early for the spinal block to be wearing off but I have a history of anesthesia wearing off early. Before I knew what was happening, I slipped into a deep sleep as they put me under to finish the surgery.

This wasn’t at all how I expected to meet my first child, but he was here anyways.

After leaving the OR, I was transferred to the maternity unit where my husband and our baby boy, ש, were waiting for me. Finally, I got to hold him.

Soon after we were reunited, I started to begin breastfeeding. I tried time and time again to express milk with no luck as his blood sugar dropped to dangerously low levels and he developed hypothermia. Combined with his tiny size, it was enough for the medical team to rush him to the NICU for monitoring and treatment. I’ll say it again for emphasis:

Screw your birth plan when your child’s life is in danger.

Since I still wasn’t cleared to walk, my husband ran to the children’s hospital alongside his incubator while I stayed behind, alone and terrified. I cried both from the fear that something was terribly wrong with our newborn and from the physical pain that radiated through my abdomen every time I moved.

The NICU was a symphony was beeping monitors and infant cries. We spent as much time as we could with our baby boy. He was connected to a monitor, and we had to ask for the nurses’ help to hold, feed, and change him. One wrong move on our part would set off a litany of alarms so we became accustomed to watching his stats on the machines connected to his little body. Every time I readjusted him in my arms, I looked to the monitor to gauge his heart rate and his respiratory rate.

My body didn’t know he was in the NICU. It didn’t know he was in the building next door or attached to monitors or learning to regulate his temperature. It only knew that I had given birth and that it was time to feed my baby.

Every three hours, my husband and I slowly made our way to the NICU. He held and fed our son while I strapped myself to a hospital-grade breast pump in a room no larger than a broom closet and tried to produce enough milk to replace the medically necessary formula. After everything that had already gone “wrong,” I just desperately wanted to be able to feed him myself.

The steady sound of the pump became the metronome of those first days. At first, almost nothing came out. It was barely more than a few droplets of colostrum, which I proudly handed to a nurse in a 10 ml syringe—a task that felt both deeply meaningful and strangely absurd. I actually sobbed the first time that I filled an entire syringe.

My incision stabbed every time I sat down to pump, and my lower belly cramped as the milk let down. The nurses explained that it was my uterus contracting back down, that the pain was normal. Still, I felt like a walking contradiction. I was too much and not enough. I was in too much pain, but didn’t have enough milk. I spent too much time attached to the pump, and not enough time beside his incubator.

There was also something extremely disorienting about being both a patient and a mother while feeling not entirely like either. Nurses checked my vitals and asked me to rate my pain from one to ten. Nine. Seven. Ten. But I powered through, and for several days I missed some checkups entirely because I was at ש’s bedside. Eventually, the nurses started calling me back to my room when the doctors made rounds.

“You can’t take care of your son if you aren’t taking care of yourself,” one of them told me. She was right.

Eventually, I was discharged. I gingerly walked out of the hospital, getting into a taxi that drove us across Haifa to our home. It was exactly as we’d left it five days before when I was sent to the emergency room.

The apartment was ready for baby. The bassinet was assembled, the diapers were stacked, and a neighbor left chicken soup in our refrigerator, which is the particular kindness of people who don't know what else to do, but as we walked in, but I felt emptiness in the silence. We were home but without ש. It was almost like I was missing an arm and there was the phantom pain of the thing that wasn’t there.

We went back to the NICU every day. It was our new full-time job as we spent eight to ten hours each day in the pediatric hospital. We learned his schedule and hunger cues in the same way that we’d been learning Hebrew. First, haltingly and later with something resembling functionality. The beeping monitors that first terrified me became background noise. Thankfully, I soon learned which alarm meant something and which one didn't. I began to know each of his nurses by name. And finally one morning a doctor told us he was ready to go home, and just like that the thing we had been waiting for was happening.

The first thing we did after he was discharged was walk the 100 meters from the pediatric hospital to the Mediterranean Sea. I wanted to show our baby boy where I go to take three deep breaths when things seem overwhelming. It seemed like an appropriate thing to do given the circumstances. We stood there for a few minutes, the three of us, in the unseasonably cool May wind. We’d been waiting for this and now it was just…here. It was both ordinary and a monumental milestone at the same time. Then, we went home.

Our apartment is still the same but now also completely different. Our family of two became a family of three, plus our pups. Baby ש is finally here, and while grateful, I was also terrified. There’s no How To guide to care for a 2.1kg newborn.

I’m pretty sure that I didn’t sit down in those first 48 hours at home. For days, my life was centered on a rigid schedule of three hour increments of feeding, pumping, burping, and diaper changes—but now there was nothing resembling structure. We no longer had the chart. There wasn’t a nurse coming to check on him every hour. No monitor telling me that his oxygen saturation was where it needed to be. Instead, I paced the length of the apartment with him against my chest because it was the only thing that kept him from screaming into the evening quiet.

In the NICU the watching was shared burden between the monitors, nurses, and us. Someone was always on the lookout. The alarms I had learned to hate were also the thing telling me he was okay. Now there was no alarm and no one to ask. Just the weight of him in my arms against the backdrop of silence in our apartment. A space that had been waiting for his arrival but felt, somehow, slightly off amidst my uncertainty.

I paced until my incision hurt with every step. Then I sat for a few moments before I got up again.

At some point the sky went from black to the greyish pink of the coming dawn. He was still here. Still breathing. I made it through the night without knowing what I was doing, which is apparently sort of the whole job.

The books warn you about sleep deprivation and hormonal swings, but they don’t really prepare you for what it feels like to leave a place where there’s the possibility (however small) that your child might not survive and suddenly be expected to function normally—and eventually thrive—at home.

Each day brings new situations. He sneezes and I Google it. He sleeps too long and I stand over the bassinet with my hand on his chest to feel it rise and fall with his breath. He makes a sound I haven’t heard before, and I text a veteran mom friend. That first week in the NICU taught me to be vigilant and then sent me home without the luxury of a heart rate and respiration monitor.

It’s hard to relax, but thank goodness that he has no idea that I don’t know what I’m doing. He’s nearly four weeks old. He fits against my chest like he was designed for it, which I suppose he was. He smells like newborn and breastmilk and a faint whiff of something that is just him. Essence of baby (?), a scent that I would know anywhere already. We’ve only been externally acquainted for fewer than 28 days, yet my body already knows him completely.

He doesn't do much yet. He blinks and stretches his arms above his head like he's asking a question. He makes weird sounds, grunts, and snorts that I learned are completely normal parts of the newborn sleep cycle. Now, I understand the difference between a “I’m hungry” cry and a “Pick me up now, please” scream. As we say in Israel, leyat, leyat. Slowly, slowly, we are learning each other.

He has no idea what the last few weeks were. Although he was there for all of it, baby ש won’t remember any of it. He won’t remember the sounds of the NICU or how terrified I was or how anxious I’ve felt as we’ve tried to get into a routine. He won’t know that my birth plan went to shit before my labor even began. Instead, I hope that he’ll just remember being held and cared for and fed and loved.

I may not know very much right now but what I do know is that I’m completely in love with him. In the meantime, I’m still figuring out everything else, and I’m okay with that.