I cry a relief so deep, and unfamiliar, that I wouldn't have been able to imagine it before; the absence of pain equaling pure joy. I ask to hold her. I'm not allowed to hold her for more than a few minutes at a time because she can't retain heat yet. Once in my arms, or hands more like it, I swear my precious tiny girl turns her head up toward me, and she knows she's all right, too.

Apparently that makes her hungry. Her eyes aren't even open, yet she reaches up and rips the feeding tube out of her nose. Alarms sound. The nurses move in with lightning speed. But I hold her protectively and ask if I can try nursing her; she obviously doesn't like eating out of her nose. While trying to pry her away from me, they inform me, the idiot, that developmentally the sucking ability doesn't kick in for another week.

I stare at them, holding on tighter. When my father was 17, he escaped from Communist Bulgaria through the Turkish underground after my capitalist grandfather was thrown in jail. My mother was throwing hand grenades in the Israeli army when she was 18. These aren't genes for the fainthearted.

"Okay, Little You, did you hear that?" I say. "If you don't want to eat through your nose -- and ew, I don't blame you -- then you have to eat here." I place her in front of my nipple and push it at her teeny mouth. The nurses stand, hands on hips, clearly wondering if they should call in whatever shrink is on duty.

She opens her little almond shaped eyes, whose lids aren't fully formed yet, and we hold each other's gaze, or so I imagine. Then she latches on and starts eating. I look up and smile at the nurses, and now they don't seem that interested in talking to me, either.

They have more important business anyway, which is to try and talk one of the other mothers out of doing the O-ring diet, where they surgically insert some sort of ring around your stomach so you can't eat too much. Her name is Stephanie and she claims she is a vegetarian, has no idea why she has always struggled with weight, and now with the baby it's just too much to battle. The nurses describe the details of the surgical procedure, in an effort to daunt her, but it's not working. Her daughter, who weighs one pound --no, that's not a typo -- isn't doing that well. Her monitors keep beeping. Stephanie keeps patting the pod as if it will make the monitors stop, her eyes fixed on the nurses, hoping they'll find a cure for her flab.

It's day four and I'm exhausted. I don't know why it never clicked in my lizard brain that feeding a newborn means being awake every three hours, even in the middle of the night. Now, when you have a preemie newborn, it means pumping in the middle of the night at home, alone, without your baby, because they won't let you sleep in the NICU.

I wake up with a start, in a horrible cold sweat, at 4 a.m. I call the NICU, and sure enough, she's awake and crying, crying for me. I go to the hospital, an hour drive from my home in Woodstock, in the dark.

I get there and she stops crying. I hold her for a few minutes, feed her. I love her more than anything in the world and suddenly I just want to take her home, even though I'm terrified. When she's back in her little pod, I sit slumped next to her, holding her tiny hand through a portal in the side of her pod. When it starts to get near 8 a.m., the tired mothers start filing in, their women's magazines in hand, and take their own stations, slumped next to their own pods.

And then, in my sleep-deprived stupor, an idea pops into my head. The NICU should be set up with cots next to these pods, so I could hold Matilda's hand all night, even when I can't hold her. We named her Matilda last night, which means battle warrior.

As people drink coffee and wake up, the conversation invariably goes to dieting and fashion. Today, they've added plastic surgery to the mix. It's not just the same old body issues, it's worse now. I swear we're all worse. Absurdly, I suppose, I sit here hoping Matilda can't hear this obsessive talk, because now that I have a little girl, I feel a ferocious protectiveness. I don't want her growing up with the same self-loathing body issues we all grew up with.

Here we all are, grown women with life experience, traumatized by births gone wrong, and all we can obsess about is being fat. I'm not outside of it, either. No one is impervious to her environment. I may make fun of it, but deep inside I'm listening, wondering if I will get back into my favorite jeans, ignoring my own frustration that my husband finds it too upsetting to be here anymore. And now that he knows Matilda will survive, in some way, he can rationalize going back to work full time, even though he doesn't have to.

As the morning drones on, I hit a wall of exhaustion. My idea to sleep in here spins a little, getting broader as I try to escape the oppressive energy of our collective obsessions, hobbies and visiting relatives, who invariably make the mothers more anxious, not less. Now I'm listening to women's sisters and mothers compare weight loss dilemmas. Ah, family legacies.

Here's an anthropological observation: The NICU brings out the worst in family dynamics, competition, shame and blame. And when the families of origin leave, quiet shame resumes, a breathing undercurrent to the metronome of magazine pages going flip flip flip.

I scootch my chair over a little, so its back is to the latest conversation about eating habits, trying to shield Matilda. She is sleeping. She's only awake every couple of hours for a few minutes. I stare deeply at her innocence, until she blurs and my idea takes focus: