When your baby stops breathing, leave him be. For twenty seconds don’t touch him. Stand by the crib, waiting. Wait, for twenty seconds.

This baby you grew in your body from zygote to embryo to fetus, who entered the world six weeks early, is now a few days old and already you are admonished to not interfere in his own autonomous life, at least not for twenty seconds, at least until his autonomic nervous system fails to do its job, then you can do one of yours—swoop him up, startle breath back into his lungs.

He can maintain his body temperature. He can nurse and breathe at the same time. Markers of his ability to live outside your body. Of his ability to live without you.

But there’s an uncertainty about his heart or his lungs, his ability to sustain breath, and for this reason when you and your baby are sent home from the hospital, your baby is hooked to a monitor, a box that hangs from your shoulder like a tote bag. The monitor receives information through wires connected to electrodes on a foam strap fitted around your baby’s chest.

The twenty seconds start when the monitor begins to beep. This is your initiation into the self-control required of parents, the standing-by until truly needed.

Twenty seconds was not a span of time worth note before now. You never imagined a second’s heft, or its ability to linger. These seconds have a shape, composed of beeps and your whispered counting. These seconds are a place you inhabit until the monitor’s silence or the number twenty releases you.

He fits along your forearm. He has a crinkly face. You fumble a diaper around his tiny bottom. You attach the foam strap around his tiny chest. You lay him down for a nap.

The monitor beeps. Your body propels you while you count. One . . . two . . . three . . . each beep a second after the last. Curve your back over the crib, reach out your hand, and don’t touch the baby. Four . . . five . . . six . . . you want to pull breath from your lungs and blow it into his. Seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . . Your post-birth body revolts—he is a brand-new baby, he is not breathing, pick up the baby. But you are obedient to the doctor’s instructions: allow him the opportunity to resume breathing on his own, let his nervous system do its job.

Your job, as you are discovering, already and too soon, is, and will be, to both hold back and intervene as needed. As you are now, a huddle of urgency and restraint. Beep—touch the baby. Beep—don’t touch the baby.

Mostly sooner than later there is silence. And the rise and fall of his chest under your hand. He is breathing again all on his own. For now.

Relax. Go start a load of laundry or jump in the shower. Listen for the beep.