Twenty-two years ago, just after Christmas, a tiny girl arrived via urgent C-section three and a half weeks before her due date. And our lives were never the same. Oh, the nurse midwife doing the pre-natal checkups warned me. She said that because of the struggle with infertility,  “This is a very special pregnancy.” And in light of the special status, she tried to take extra care of me and the baby. Her statement bothered me at the time. Every pregnancy, every human being, is precious, no matter the circumstances of conception or birth. Yet I appreciated the midwife’s conscientiousness with me, her concern when measurements came up short, the live-saving hospital intervention that yielded a stubbornly sleepy five-pound daughter.

The changes to our lives at first, the special ways of our child, were explosive. The impact of the sudden delivery transformed me–the incision healed rapidly, but I felt like a different person. I didn’t know what was wrong, and neither did anyone else. I sobbed in my hospital bed two days in, locked in this fluorescent hive of evolving nurse bulletins because of the vulnerabilities of the too-tiny stranger. The twists in this 24-hour hospital plot were endless. The baby was yellow and needed a Bili light. I developed a severe headache from the anesthesia and dragged myself through a baby care class required for our release, where I learned that the baby powder my mother had relied on through four children was no longer recommended. From the staff tag-teaming on eight-hour shifts, I received a stream of advice and warnings, some of it contradictory.

And then from the confines of the railed bed, the cacophony of professional tips, the nocturnal thudding doors,  the unchanging proximity to the longed-for daylight from the window, and the new-mother drama from the other bed behind the curtain emerged a growing panic– a sharp, heart-pounding anxiety that clung to me even after we arrived home. I didn’t know what to do with this little girl, who wanted to sleep more than cooperate with what the hospital people told me she should be doing–eating, getting nourishment. Her priorities were clearly different, and no desperate late-night techniques to keep the prescribed three-hour schedule, differing opinions between me and her other caregivers, or well-baby visits to experienced, opinionated medical personnel would budge her from her commitment to days of limp oblivion.

We, on the other hand, were awake too often during the night, and through our haze of sleeplessness, worried about what might befall this little girl, or even me. I especially was stricken with weeks-long insomnia, and worked hard to think straight in my discussions with husband and family–to think straight in general. I, who had considered myself good with babies, ready for my own children, could only look helpless now at the infant slumbering in her car seat, heart racing at the thought of what I would do if she stirred, cried, or worst of all, needed a change of clothes. From the first day home, I felt some relief in keeping space between her and me. I thought of the hospital and how that institution could gulp me back into its maw–maybe because of my speeding heart. Perhaps I would need to be “committed.”  Or, I would get one of the infections the nurses bade me watch for. Or the baby would stop breathing, or not get enough nourishment, or be too warm or too cold. I spent time putting blankets on the baby, then taking them off, then putting them on again.

Two realizations surfaced after this new life crashed into our world. One morning, I opened my eyes, focused on the dark antique dresser in our bedroom, and thought that this was the hardest time in my life so far. That crushing dread, the heart palpitations, the paralysis, and the incomprehension of family made it so. Another day, as I sat on the nursery’s blue rug chosen in the anticipatory days of pregnancy, it came to me that I no longer knew where I kept my silverware. I just couldn’t summon that mental picture. I felt lost. The old me, the one that went to work teaching seventh graders to diagram sentences, the one who enjoyed get-togethers with family, who was competent and could locate her forks and spoons, was gone. I felt as if I had stepped off a carousel, where the rest of the world lived a bright and noisy existence, and was standing quietly alone on the grass, watching life go around without me.

The only thing to do, of course, was to move forward with our new life. We got hopeful glimpses of what it might be like when one night, our daughter began to wake and cry when she was hungry. And then there was that bracing walk in the January air that suddenly cleared my head. I took a nap at my parents, then began sleeping again. Our days would get back to a routine, but a new one. And it would be good. On a drive to my parents’ house when my daughter was just a few months old, a plane flew over low, like old times. I looked out of my windshield at a heady blue sky, anticipating the visit. Just like that, I was back on the carousel. Only now, there was a fuzzy-haired infant in the back seat.

The baby filled out, became downright chunky by four months. She’d slept through the night at nine weeks. We have video of her beginning to coo, adorably trying to talk to us, and my husband looking back at me to make sure I was catching this. She laughed aloud at the cat while sitting in her bouncy seat one day. There was sitting, crawling, pulling herself up, perusing her picture books. Then her first words and our daily intense segments together on the enriching children’s puzzles and books flooding the market. We loved telling the story of her first joke, and her fits of hilarity at having it repeated to her. She became a big sister while still a toddler, and although our world was exploded again, that time off the carousel seemed far away and long ago. It was a blip in our existence and worth it–oh, so worth it–for these two girls who were indeed special, who blossomed into caring young women and became my friends.