He was born at 1:47 in the morning, delivered by cesarean section at 34 weeks into the pregnancy. He was wrinkled and screaming and the midwife held him out to me for a quick kiss before he was whisked away to the NICU. Lights started flashing in front of my eyes and it was my husband’s turn to kiss me goodbye as I was taken to intermediate care. The rest of the dark morning hours passed in a confused sleep and when I woke I had a horrible feeling of no feeling. I’d had a baby but he was not there and the overpowering love I expected did not come. I did not even really remember what my son looked like.

As the day wore on I grew frantic. Doctors came and checked my blood pressure, my reflexes. My husband and stepson visited the baby in the NICU and texted me photos. He was curled up in a tiny bed, covered in blankets. His face was hidden by a breathing mask and his hair by a blue cap to which the mask was attached. I still could not really tell what he looked like but I knew one thing for sure: I was in the wrong place. I was his mother and I should be with him, not lying in bed in another building.

This was my introduction to the gnawing guilt and shame that would accompany me for the next weeks. After the connection of carrying a developing human being inside me, I felt empty and with no sense of having given birth. I hadn’t given anything: I’d lain there while he was cut out of me before he was able to breathe on his own.

The week before he was born I was in the hospital because of high blood pressure and headaches, both of which improved after I was admitted. My preeclampsia was mild and I expected to be released soon. I was being monitored for that week, just in case. I was given cortisone shots to help the baby’s lungs develop, just in case. I was informed by a young doctor from the neonatology unit that a premature birth would be no one’s fault should it happen, just in case.

When the blood pressure monitor wouldn’t stop blaring its alarm and my red blood cells started to break down, the just in case became reality. My husband drove to the hospital at midnight and I was taken to the operating room. I didn’t want the baby to come; I wasn’t ready; he wasn’t ready.

Late in the afternoon on the day he was born, I was finally wheeled in my bed through the underground passage connecting my hospital to his. My bed was placed next to his, and as I waited for a nurse to help lift him onto my chest I reached out my finger to stroke his hand.

Over the next days I realized one thing clearly: he was in the hospital because I was sick and it was therefore my fault he was in intensive care. This was not rational and I would never have thought it about another person. But the feeling took hold of me and I cried when I was alone, wiping the tears off for visitors. When I was released home I was ashamed to see friends because I had left my baby behind in the hospital. What kind of mother leaves her baby? The darkest point came when I realized I would be happy to die and leave the guilt and the intense worry behind.

I got better: my husband never left me alone in my feelings of grief and shame. My son got better: he was moved from the NICU to the regular children’s ward and then released home to us. He was small but perfect, healthy and strong. The anxiety that gripped me since his birth began to release its hold on my heart. He lay in his tiny crib next to our bed each night and every time I leaned over to check if his lungs were still working he was breathing peacefully.

Women and their babies around the world still die from complications due to preeclampsia and premature birth every year. The good outcomes my son and I experienced were possible through access to modern medicine. The guilt mothers feel for any harm that comes to our children, including their birth, is timeless. But so is the feeling I had when I stroked my son’s hand for that first time in the NICU: a feeling of overpowering love.