The Child We Were Given   

At three a.m. Thursday morning, we had hours to go before we could start making phone calls, informing her proud grandparents, aunts, uncles, and four older sisters of her arrival. For now, ours was a world of three.

And then, our world was rudely intruded upon with the arrival of a team of doctors, who coldly informed us that our baby had been blessed with a cluster of birth defects. None of them were life threatening; they weren’t even lifelong. Each, with varying degrees of severity, would either correct itself or was correctable with surgery. And yet, a few of the issues were serious, and their corrective surgeries were serious, too.

The doctors retreated, and my husband and I were left to wrap our minds around this new information. Our room was suddenly darker and quieter. Deep in my postpartum haze, I vacillated between euphoria: “This is my special miracle princess! I waited six years for her, and nothing can dampen my joy!” and despair: “This is too much for me to handle. Hashem, why couldn’t you give me a healthy baby?”