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This September we honoured Neonatal intensive care unit (Nicu) Awareness Month by sharing our stories in support of those parents who are living theirs right now. This is my story.

My daughter spent the first eight days of her life in NICU and High Care. In that time everything was so up in the air it seemed we would never feel the comfort of solid ground again. Instead of the answers we were desperate for, we were almost always left with more questions. And the truth of a premature baby’s circumstance is that nobody can predict with 100% certainty what will happen – and even more truthfully nobody wants to in case they get it wrong.

So NICU becomes a place of parental limbo. You are not really parenting because nurses are watching your child around the clock and you often feel more in the way than a critical member of the equation. You are not in charge of your child’s care, decisions are made without you, and you tend to find out once they have already happened: feeding times, checkups, nappy changes, baths, needles, drip changes, medicines and even medical interventions.

You are not in charge of your child, a team of strangers are. You return to the maternity ward childless, you return home to your beautiful nursery childless. You have a child and everyone is asking how that child is. But you are in parental limbo, and you have very few answers to provide because you are on a need-to-know basis and the medical team are deciding what you need to know.

In parental limbo, your plans also don’t always work, making you feel even more powerless.

SMS the keyword PARENT, followed by your comment or question to 33521. SMSs are charged at R1.50 and errors will be billed. Free and bundle SMSs do not apply. Skin-to-skin sounded like an amazing way to nudge a brand new earthling into the world. I had planned for lots of skin-toskin time. But then I went from planning to execution and, at the risk of sounding like a stuck record, planning and parenthood go together like cereal and water.

When your daughter is in an incubator and attached to wires and drips in a bustling ward with very little privacy, skin-to-skin, while not impossible, is definitely not the dreamy soft focus vision that came to mind when constructing my plans.

In parental limbo you miss out on a lot

There were a few small upsides to my plans going to hell in a handbag. One was that because we were not in charge of Izzy’s care for those first eight days we avoided the much-dreaded first poop.

According to Wikipedia: “Meconium is the earliest stool of a mammalian infant. Unlike later faeces, meconium is composed of materials ingested during the time the infant spends in the uterus: intestinal epithelial cells, lanugo (fine soft hair that covers the body and limbs of a human fetus), mucus, amniotic fluid, bile and water.”

Why is this poop so kak (excuse the pun)? Because it is pitch black like tar and it has the same consistency. It is sticky as hell, like, “Oh well, that is just gonna have to stay there forever”. But as I said we never saw it or had to clean it, so whatever happened, or however it happened, it happened without us. And I for one do not feel less of a parent for dodging that bullet. Always cling to the small wins.

Parental limbo is a confined and regulated place

One of the stark reminders that the NICU is a place for sick and vulnerable babies are the procedures. As you enter the room, you must thoroughly wash and sanitise your hands. After eight days my clinically diagnosed OCD husband had vigorously washed cavernous cracks into his knuckles that took weeks and weeks to heal after we left the NICU.

Parents are allowed to visit almost always, except after 10pm and during shift handovers between 6.30pm and 7.30pm. Grandparents and other immediate family are not as free to visit. My parents and Will’s sister saw Izzy for the first time in real life

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about three days after she was born.

Two evenings a week, grandparents (and in the absence of grandparents, a familial substitute) may visit. One at a time your family member can enter, wash and sterilise and stare at the baby in its incubator.

Or if they are brave and if the baby is strong enough they can hold it briefly. This relay of awkwardness and quiet fluster is carried out over the course of the visitor’s hour.

Parental limbo is a joy thief

NICU has a lot of rules, a lot of doctors and nurses, a lot of machines, a lot of beeping, a lot of squalling, a measure of false cheer, a lot of silent tears and many bereft parents, wondering how they ended up here, at a time we are all led to believe should be the happiest and momentous time of our lives.

I have no words of solace or false optimism for anyone who has or is experiencing this place of parental limbo. Because that would be glib and disingenuous.

All I can say is I hope you and your baby get out soon.

And until then, know you are not as alone or as useless as you may feel.

More brutally honest parenting advice online parenty.co.za