What Does “Normal” Even Mean?
🇯🇵Read in Japanese
About three days after giving birth to my daughter, I was discharged from the hospital.
I had always imagined that leaving the hospital after giving birth would mean walking out with my baby in my arms, going home together, and beginning our new life as a family from that day forward.
At least, that was what I had imagined during my pregnancy.
You give birth to your baby, you hold her, you bring her home, and when night comes, she sleeps somewhere beside you; when she cries, you wake up and feed her.
I knew it would be exhausting.
But I still believed that kind of life would simply begin the moment my baby was born.
But on the day I left the hospital, my daughter stayed behind in the NICU.
I was discharged.
She was still a patient.
Only three days earlier, we had been together every second of every day, sharing the same body, and yet the moment she was born, our lives had somehow separated into two different places.
I went home.
She stayed at the hospital.
I knew I had given birth to a baby, but when I returned home, there was no baby there.
At night, there was no crying.
There was no tiny body sleeping beside me.
She was no longer inside my belly, either.
She wasn’t inside me.
And she wasn’t beside me.
My heart could not quite understand what had happened.
I cried every night.
I missed her.
And the more I wanted to see her, the more I found myself wondering,
“Why isn’t she here?”
I knew that I had given birth.
My body knew it too.
My stomach no longer looked or felt the way it had during pregnancy, and everything about my body told me that childbirth had happened.
And yet my arms were empty.
Sometimes the whole thing felt so unreal that I wondered whether I had truly given birth at all.
I had become a mother.
But I did not yet feel like one.
Somewhere inside me, I had imagined that becoming a mother would happen instantly, that the moment my baby was born something inside me would change and I would simply know,
“I’m her mom now.”
But that was not how it happened for me.
Technically, I became her mother the moment she was born.
Emotionally, I think I was still trying to catch up.
After I was discharged, we went to the NICU every single day.
To see her.
And to bring her milk.
Whenever my husband had a day off, we drove to the hospital together.
On the days he had to work, I traveled alone by train, about ninety minutes each way.
Nearly three hours of traveling there and back.
My body was still recovering from childbirth, and carrying milk with me while making that journey almost every day was exhausting.
Looking back now, I think that was one of the hardest periods of all.
My body had not fully recovered.
At night, I often cried because I missed my daughter.
But when morning came, the same thought always returned.
“I’m going to see her today.”
If my husband was off work, we drove together.
If he was working, I took the train alone.
The way I got there changed.
But there was never a day when I did not want to go.
Whenever he could, my husband also came after work, traveling to the hospital just to spend whatever time he could with our daughter before going home again.
Without realizing it, our entire daily life had begun to revolve around the NICU.
Even when I was at home, I was thinking about the next time I would be able to see her.
Some days, I would walk into the NICU, look at my daughter’s face, and tears would simply begin to fall.
Nothing bad had happened.
The doctor had not just given us frightening news.
Sometimes she was simply lying there.
And still, I cried.
She was beautiful.
I had missed her.
She was alive today.
She was trying so hard.
I wanted to take her home.
I wanted to know why I couldn’t simply bring my own baby home with me.
There were so many emotions mixed together that I often had no idea what the tears actually meant.
Sometimes I would be smiling at her while tears ran down my face.
And sometimes I wondered,
“What would we be doing right now if everything had been normal?”
If she had been born and come home with us.
Would I be holding her at home?
Would we be exhausted from waking up all night?
Would I be feeding her, changing her diaper, giving her a bath?
The life with a newborn that I had imagined during pregnancy had not begun.
Instead, every day we traveled to the hospital and visited our daughter in the NICU, surrounded by medical equipment.
That was our postpartum life.
Feeding was different from what I had imagined too.
At first, I was able to produce some breast milk, but before long my supply became difficult to maintain, and we transitioned to formula fairly early.
Because our daughter had a cleft palate, even drinking by mouth required practice.
Something as simple as “feeding my baby” looked very different from the picture I had carried in my mind before she was born.
Maybe the old version of me would have looked at each of those differences and thought,
“This isn’t normal.”
Normally, a baby goes home with her parents.
Normally, parenting begins at home.
Normally, a baby drinks milk by mouth.
Normally—
But the more time I spent going back and forth to the NICU, the less certain I became about that word.
What does “normal” even mean?
My daughter was not the only baby in the NICU.
There were many babies there, each hospitalized for different reasons, each surrounded by different equipment, each with families coming to sit beside them.
Being there made me wonder whether there had ever really been one correct way for life with a newborn to begin.
Some babies go home almost immediately.
Some spend weeks or months in the hospital.
Some can drink milk on their own from the beginning, while others have to practice.
Some need help to breathe.
And each of those beginnings belongs to a real child and a real family.
My daughter spent about a month in the NICU.
Day after day, we continued going to see her, and slowly, time passed.
Eventually, the doctors told us something we had desperately hoped to hear.
It looked as though she might be able to manage breathing on her own.
That meant more to me than I could explain.
Breathing had frightened us since before she was born.
We had been told that she might need respiratory support, and yet this tiny girl had spent the first month of her life working so hard, breath after breath, until we finally heard the words we had been waiting for.
She might be able to breathe on her own.
One month.
Maybe that doesn’t sound very long.
But to us, it felt enormous.
After about a month, our daughter was transferred from the hospital where she had been born to a university hospital closer to our home.
She still wasn’t coming home.
But she was coming closer.
And somehow, even that felt like progress.
At the university hospital, the next stage began.
This time, we were not only learning about our daughter’s condition.
We were learning how to care for her ourselves.
The nurses began teaching us, one step at a time, some of the things they had been doing for her in the hospital, because once she eventually came home, there would not always be a nurse standing beside us if something happened.
We would be the ones there.
So we learned how to handle her feeding tube, how to give her milk, what changes in her condition we needed to watch for, and how to bathe her safely.
We were also told that she could be prone to middle ear infections, so when bathing or showering her, we needed to be especially careful not to let water get into her ears.
Even something as ordinary as giving our baby a bath was something we had to learn slowly and carefully.
And yet, bath time became one of my favorite moments.
For me, bathing her was not simply about keeping her clean.
It became one of the moments when I could truly feel,
“I’m this little girl’s mom.”
Every night, I had returned to a home without my daughter.
There had been moments when I felt so disconnected from motherhood that I wondered whether I had really given birth at all.
But when I supported her tiny body with my own hands, gently poured warm water over her, washed her face and body, and watched every little expression she made, something inside me changed.
Of course, I was nervous.
I had to be careful not to get water into her ears.
I worried about whether I was holding her correctly, whether she was comfortable, whether I was doing everything the way I had been taught.
“Does that feel nice?”
I would talk to her while I washed her, watching her face and touching her tiny arms and legs.
In the NICU, it was sometimes difficult not to notice the machines and tubes before anything else.
But during bath time, I could forget about them for a little while.
She was not a patient surrounded by medical equipment.
She was simply my daughter, resting in my hands.
Feeling the warmth of her tiny body against my palms, I could finally think,
“Oh… I really am her mom.”
I had not suddenly felt like a mother the moment she was born.
For me, that feeling came little by little.
Holding her.
Bringing her milk.
Traveling to see her.
And bathing her with my own hands.
Bath time was something we needed to learn before she could eventually come home, but for me, it became something more than practice.
It became one of the small moments I looked forward to most.
A moment when I could feel that I was becoming her mother.
At the same time, even as we learned how to care for her at home, there were still many things about the future that frightened me.
One of them was her feet.
Both of her feet had turned strongly inward since birth.
We were told that because her clubfoot was significant, she would need continued treatment as she grew, and that surgery might eventually become necessary.
She could not even hold her head up yet.
Rolling over, sitting, standing, walking—all of those things still belonged to a future far away.
And yet I was already being asked to imagine a future in which the word “surgery” might stand somewhere between my daughter and the day she learned to walk.
That frightened me.
Would these tiny feet someday support her?
Would she be able to stand?
Would she be able to walk?
Looking at her feet, I sometimes found myself worrying about a future that had not even happened yet.
But something inside me had changed since pregnancy.
Back then, I had been afraid of a future I could not see.
Now, I had my daughter in front of me.
If she needed surgery someday, we would think about it then.
If she needed treatment, we would face it with her when that day came.
Right now, she did not need us to solve the question of whether she would someday walk.
She needed us to learn how to care for her today.
Before she was born, I had assumed that parenting was something you somehow learned naturally once your baby came home.
But we had a few extra things to learn.
At first, I was terrified.
Can we really do all of this ourselves at home?
What if something happens?
What if the milk doesn’t go in properly?
What if there is a problem with the tube?
What if her breathing changes?
If I allowed myself to keep asking “what if,” there was no end to the fear.
But every time a nurse showed us how to do something, and every time we practiced it ourselves, another thought slowly began to appear beside the fear.
Maybe we can do this.
Everything was new.
Of course we were not going to be good at it immediately.
If we didn’t understand something, we could ask.
If we couldn’t do something yet, we could practice again.
Our daughter was learning how to drink.
Maybe we were learning how to become her parents.
I had not suddenly transformed into a mother who knew how to do everything the moment she was born.
Instead, I traveled to the hospital every day.
I held her.
I cried.
I listened to the doctors.
I learned from the nurses.
I bathed her and felt the warmth of her body in my own hands.
And little by little, I learned more about the tiny person who was my daughter.
Maybe that was how I became her mother.
Every night, I had cried in a home where my baby was missing.
There were moments when the whole experience felt so unreal that I wondered whether I had truly given birth.
But when I look back now, I realize that all of it was part of me becoming her mother.
The days when my husband and I drove to the hospital together.
The days when he had to work and I carried milk with me on the ninety-minute train ride alone.
The moments when simply seeing her face in the NICU made me cry.
And the bath times when I held her tiny body and thought,
“I really am this little girl’s mom.”
All of it was part of the same journey.
And slowly, another thought began to grow inside me.
Instead of asking,
“Why did this happen to her?”
I began to think,
“Maybe she came to us because she could live with us.”
There would be her condition.
Her breathing.
Her feeding.
Her feet.
The treatments and surgeries she might need in the future.
None of it would necessarily be easy, and there might be things waiting for us that we could not yet imagine.
But somewhere inside me, I began to believe:
Maybe she was born to us because, with us, she could live.
There was no special reason for me to believe that.
It wasn’t because I thought we were strong enough to handle everything.
If anything, I was still frightened of almost everything.
But I began to feel that there might be some meaning in the fact that this little girl had come into our lives.
So we would learn.
If we couldn’t do something, we would practice.
If we didn’t understand something, we would ask someone to teach us.
If we became afraid, we would face one thing at a time.
Just as our daughter was slowly learning what she needed in order to live,
we could slowly learn how to live beside her.
What is a “normal family,” anyway?
I still don’t really know.
Is it a family that takes their baby home immediately after birth?
A mother who breastfeeds?
Parents who never have to use medical equipment?
A childhood without constant hospital visits?
I don’t think that is what makes a family a family.
Maybe we didn’t need to become anyone else’s version of one.
We could become a family in our own way.
Our daughter had her own pace.
And we had our own beginning.
That was enough.
After one month in the NICU, as I watched our daughter move to a university hospital closer to home, I slowly began to understand that.
Ito-chan,
after you were born, I thought about the word “normal” again and again.
But eventually, whether our life was normal or not began to matter less and less.
You were breathing today.
We could see you.
Something you couldn’t do yesterday might become something you could do tomorrow.
And we would have another day together.
That was enough.
We still had a little way to go before we could finally bring you home.
But we were getting closer.
Not because you needed to become our daughter—
you already were.
But because we were still learning
how to become your mom and dad.
Looking back now,
I think we needed that month.
Not to learn how to have a “normal” family,
but to begin becoming
our family.
