When did i get like this.., p.18
When Did I Get Like This?, page 18
The moderator of the discussion, a woman named Esther, had her baby with her—her ninth, she told us. She dandled him tummy-down across her knee in a vaguely distracted way for our entire conversation. I don’t think she looked down at him once. Nor did he make a peep. Esther knew her stuff.
Esther began by discussing the importance of organization for any mother. “I find I do best,” she said, “when I know who our guests for Friday’s Sabbath dinner are by no later than Monday evening.” All the other women nodded, dutifully transcribing this in their notebooks and PDAs. “Then you marinate your brisket or whatever on Wednesday,” Esther continued, “and start your challah on Thursday, so the yeast has time to rise overnight.” I sat there thinking of my wedding china, still sitting in its protective Styrofoam wrapping. I had never had anyone over for a formal dinner, ever. Even Taco Night was beyond me. These women used the good crystal every Friday? I no longer felt like I could claim to be overwhelmed. A typical Friday night, for me, was ordering in Thai food when David got home from the gym.
When it was time for questions, I was gratified to hear at least some expression of bitterness from one of the mothers present. “If I ask my husband to watch the baby while I make dinner,” she said, “he’ll do it for a few minutes, but then she’s back out in the kitchen, clinging to my legs while my husband reads the newspaper.” Right on, sister, I thought to myself. Awaken the feminist within!
“This is something we all struggle with,” Esther said sympathetically. “Men do not help like they should.” The other mothers nodded.
“The Talmud has a saying about this,” Esther said, continuing as we all leaned forward in our chairs. “Nashim datan kalot. Now, this has traditionally been translated as ‘Women’s knowledge is light,’ meaning that our minds are simple. Fit only for household matters.”
Aha! I thought as I scribbled. This bullshit goes way back.
“But the more accurate translation,” Esther said, “is ‘Women’s knowledge is light footed.’ We can do many things lightly. Men cannot do more than one thing at a time. We women can. Baruch Hashem.”
Nashim datan kalot, I wrote in my notebook, hoping I was spelling it more or less correctly. Esther was not saying her mind was more lightweight than her husband’s. She was saying that, unlike him, she could multitask like you read about. I imagined Esther on a Friday afternoon, preparing for her dinner guests, her own Taco Night. As she pulled the challah out of the oven with one hand, she would get out the Shabbat candles with the other, all the while keeping the baby’s bouncy chair going with her foot. The plumber would have shown up to fix the toilet in time for sundown, the phone would be ringing, and three of her other kids would be throwing all the couch pillows on the floor, jumping on them, and yelling loud enough to be heard down the street. Amidst all of this, Esther would look down the hall into the living room to see her husband, relaxing on the couch with an early-arriving dinner guest, discussing the Torah. Or Duke’s coaching strategies for the upcoming NCAA season. Esther would look at her husband, sitting there doing nothing, and think, Bless him. Bless his feeble mind.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Inhumane
“We’re doing it tonight,” David said.
How I dreaded those words.
I should have been feeling invincible. I had, after all, just faced down the unholiest of childhood ailments, the tenacious and onomatopoeically named Coxsackie disease. (I hesitate to even invoke its name in print; perhaps you should go outside and turn around three times after reading this paragraph.) There are many greater dangers to a child’s health than the Coxsackie virus, but only Coxsackie, with its rash of tiny blisters in the mouth and back of the throat, will make your child so cranky and clingy you will long for some good old appendicitis.
Maggie, at one and a half, was at the tail end of her Coxsackie experience. After a weekend of a low fever, no sleep, and so much crying I never put her down, I called her pediatrician, who phone-diagnosed it as garden-variety teething. Once it went on for two more days, it was the nurse practitioner who discovered the abscesses in Maggie’s throat. As Maggie sniffled in my arms, recovering from the indignity of the tongue depressor, I asked the nurse what course of treatment she recommended. “Motrin and time,” she said, shrugging sympathetically.
I had already given Maggie plenty of each, but it didn’t seem to help much, especially at night, when she had nothing to distract her from the pain. I had spent the better part of a week rocking her to sleep only to have her wake up as soon as I tried to lay her down in her crib. In an act of desperation late one night, I brought her back into bed with me. I was sure it wouldn’t work. None of our kids ever slept in our bed with us; no matter the hour, if they were in Mommy and Daddy’s bed, it was playtime of the most exciting sort. This time, though, Maggie was so exhausted that she fell asleep on my chest almost instantly, her feverish head radiating heat across my chest that was not at all unpleasant. David had willingly decamped to the couch, and for the next four nights, Maggie slept in our bed with me, happily and relatively soundly. If she whimpered, I was able to soothe her back to sleep before either one of us really woke up.
But payback time had come, as it must. “She’s better, Ame,” David said, putting on his cuff links one morning as he stood over Maggie and me, still under the covers. “We don’t want to get in a bad habit. Starting tonight, we have to let her cry it out.”
Out of all the unpleasant duties one has as a parent, “crying it out” is the one I have gone to the greatest lengths to avoid. From the beginning, I have tried to ingrain each of my babies with excellent sleep habits (not counting Connor’s reflux days). I would put my babies down in their cribs, swaddled within an inch of their lives, sleepy but, for heaven’s sake, not yet asleep. They fell asleep alone, and on their own, and I confess to committing the deadly sin of pride whenever someone expressed astonishment that it took sixty seconds for me to put all three of my children to bed.
With each of my children, though, there have been times of 3:00 A.M. tough love, necessitated by illness or visiting relatives or incoming molars. According to the laws of “crying it out,” the only way to train (or retrain) a child to fall asleep on his own is to leave that child in his crib, to heave and bellow and rend his garments. You may visit at increasing intervals, to assure your child that he is safe, but under no circumstances do you take him out of his crib. Eventually, he will cry himself to sleep. After an unpleasant night or two, your child will sleep through without waking, and so will you.
There are many who say this is unthinkable child warping. Your baby cries out for you, and you ignore her? How will she ever feel secure in this world again? I saw the merits of this argument, and also knew from experience that “crying it out” usually refers to the traumatized mother’s reaction at least as much as the infant’s. I dreaded the coming evening’s events more than the contagion of Coxsackie itself. I would gladly have taken my own set of throat blisters over what was about to come.
Night One
I put Maggie in my bed at her bedtime and, when 10:00 P.M. comes, transfer her to her crib. She cries out for a moment, then rolls over and goes back to sleep. My God, I think, this is going to be fine, and go back out to the den to celebrate with two more hours of worthless television.
I go to bed at midnight. At one thirty, I hear the wail of what my dream at first tells me is a faraway but insistent ambulance. “Moh-AAHHH-oh-MEEEE…Moh-AAHHH-oh-MEEEE…” I sit up, like a bride of Dracula, and prepare to stagger to my master. “Leave her,” David says in the dark.
I listen for ten minutes exactly, judging by the bright blue alarm clock on David’s side of the bed. Then I go into her room to try to soothe her back to sleep. Maggie reaches her chubby arms up to me, and when I say, “Sweetie, it’s time for night-night,” she utterly loses her shit.
I beat a hasty retreat. Now I am supposed to let at least twenty minutes go by before I return. After seventeen minutes of unabated howling:
ME: What if she wakes the boys?
DAVID: She won’t.
ME: Oh come on, they’re going to sleep through this?
DAVID: They have so far.
We lie there listening. Once the clock says twenty minutes have elapsed, Maggie sounds like a car alarm that has been going off for three days, about to finally drain its battery: “UhhhwaaaAHHHoooo…WAAhhhoooommm…omm…eeee…” According to the rules of crying it out, this is a crucial game-changer. If the baby sounds like she’s giving up, you do not go in, even if the clock indicates you may, because you may already have won.
Maggie is quiet for five full minutes. I close my eyes and instantaneously enter a REM cycle. Then Maggie starts hollering again, with renewed energy.
ME: What if she’s still sick, and we’re letting her cry? That’s inhumane.
DAVID: Yes, that would be. Inhumane.
Maggie is keening, a lamentation of her own invention. It is killing me.
ME: But if she’s not sick, and I go get her now, then I let her cry for half an hour for nothing.
DAVID: That’s also true.
We are quiet for a moment.
ME: Thirty-five minutes, actually.
I turn the alarm clock away from me. It is not helping. The digital readout shines a blue nimbus on the wall.
ME: Why would she cry like this if she’s not sick?
DAVID: Because she wants to be in here with us?
ME: Yeah, but is it worth crying thirty-eight minutes over?
DAVID: I don’t know.
I find this maddening. He refuses to take a stand, so that whatever I do, should it turn out to be the wrong thing, he can say he advocated the opposite.
ME: You always do this.
DAVID: No I don’t.
ME: If you really agree with me that we might be being inhumane, how can you just lie there?
DAVID: Go ahead. Get her.
I get out of bed, relieved he’s giving me permission.
DAVID: But if you bring her in here, and she goes right back to sleep, then you’ll know she’s not sick.
Way to play both sides, Dr. Sears.
Maggie does go back to sleep between us after only a modicum of fuss but, with dawn’s first light, is sitting up between us, crowing, “Hi Mommy! Hi Daddy! Mommy-daddy wake up!” as if it is high noon rather than 5:00 A.M. She shows no memory of the night before. I feel like Wile E. Coyote when the Road Runner shouts “Meep meep!” and the coyote understands that he has, once again, been had. How can she have slept only six hours last night, including a two-hour break in the middle, and be smiling this morning? What the hell is there to smile about?
Night Five
Clearly Maggie is no longer sick, but after beating me into co-sleeping submission for the better part of a week, she is drunk with power. “Mommy bed!” she bellows at bedtime, pointing down the hall. I deposit her in her crib, where she stands roaring, rattling the bars as if in Attica. David and I are already fifteen minutes late for a dinner reservation; the rookie college-aged babysitter stands in the hallway, ashen-faced. In desperation, I lose my slingbacks and climb into the crib with Maggie, who lays her sweaty head down and falls into dreamless slumber in about forty-five seconds. After ten minutes of slow-motion contortions to pole-vault myself over the side of the crib, I am free, and Maggie is still asleep. At the moment I consider this a big step forward. When she wakes at 11:00 P.M., 1:00 A.M., and 4:15 A.M., demanding I climb back in the crib with her each time, it seems less so.
Night Eight
Honestly, who is in charge here? Tonight she will remain alone in her crib from 7:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M., a reasonable expectation for a young lady of her age. No matter what, I am not taking her out.
After ninety minutes of crying, beginning at 2:30 A.M.:
ME: If I bring her back into bed with us right now, maybe she’ll sleep until seven.
David’s breathing is heavy. He does not answer.
ME: If you were me, what would you do right now?
David just lies there.
ME: I want you to just tell me what to do. Basically. Is what I’m saying.
DAVID: Well. I’m not sure.
ME: Thank you.
Maggie yowls away.
ME: So what should I do?
David snores.
It always amazes me that David can fall back to sleep at such a moment. His own flesh and blood is screaming like she is being stuck with a series of rusty pins, and David can doze off to it, as if he were being lulled by lazy waves lapping the shore outside his five-star villa. I think this says less about him than it does about me. Maggie’s cries are physiologically designed to turn me inside out. The perpetuation of the human race must have depended on it really bothering the cavewoman when her baby cried, so she’d figure the whole breastfeeding thing out. We modern mothers are hardwired with this vestigial remnant of our former selves. Let’s face it, Maggie’s not calling Daddy a hundred thousand times a night, probably because she knows it would be a waste of her time.
How I wish I could go back to sleep like that. When I was pregnant I had terrible insomnia and was often up for a few hours in the middle of the night. That insomnia was kind of fun; I watched bad TV and ate Bellybars and did my taxes, all in the wee small hours, all alone. This is nothing like that. I lie there in the dark, listening to her wail, working a tessellation of if/thens without solutions. Let her cry? Bad mother. Go in to her? Bad mother. I lie there paralyzed, incapable of any action except that of hating my own life.
Night Thirteen
I have made considerable progress: I no longer actually have to be in the crib with Maggie, so long as I stand there, rubbing her back in counterclockwise circles, until she falls completely asleep. Since her internal sensors will then detect the slightest motion, even with her eyes closed, I drop to the floor, crawling out of the room with painstaking slowness. I make it to the door, closing it behind me with the quietest click I can manage. She is immediately, and fully, awake. Lather, rinse, repeat. After the first few rounds, I start leaning over the slats of the crib and getting a few minutes of shut-eye there myself, like a soon-to-be-disqualified danceathoner.
Night Sixteen
We are away with the kids for a long weekend. I have placed Maggie in a Pack ’n Play in the downstairs guest bedroom, hoping that her crying might not reverberate quite so loudly from there. But when she whimpers at 4:30 A.M., I hear her immediately and stumble to the bedroom door without even waking up fully. At the door, something stops me. Honestly, screw this, I think, closing the door. She can wait until 5:00.
At 6:45, Connor opens our door. “Maggie’s crying down there, Mom,” he says nonchalantly. I run down the stairs, overcome with remorse for the tearstained, sobbing sight that surely awaits me. Instead, Maggie waves to me from the Pack ’n Play, crowing, “Hi, Mommy!” The Road Runner was still saying “meep meep!” but Wile E. had won the round. Maybe Maggie had gone back to sleep, and maybe she cried for two hours, it was hard to say; but since she wasn’t scarred for life by it, mine was not to reason why.
Night Twenty
Home from our little vacation, David and I are sure we have won. We have slept past 6:00 A.M. for the last three nights; so, we assume, has she.
At 4:00 A.M., Maggie starts crying out: “Mooommmmmyyyy…Wheh ah yoooo, Moommmmyyy…” Sixty minutes later, she has hollered this another three hundred and forty-two times. I barrel down the hall to her room. “Now you listen to me, young lady! You go back to sleep right now!” Maggie screams, squeezing huge, hot tears of rage down her cheeks. We have gotten nowhere. I prayed for a strong-willed daughter, and I have received one.
At five thirty, David brings her back to our bed before he staggers to the shower. “I’m mad at you, Maggie,” I say. “Look at Mommy’s mad face.” She regards me seriously but without fear. I own you, is what she’s thinking.
“I can’t do this,” I say to David when he reemerges from the bathroom. “I can’t get up at four o’clock in the morning every day.”
“I know,” he replies. “But it’s not really your fault.”
Hmm?
“Not really my fault?” I sputter. “Seems to me it’s not my fault at all.”
“Well, no, I just meant—”
“Seems to me that the only blameless person here is me,” I continue. “If you disagree with how I’m handling things, perhaps you’d like a turn.”
“I say we stick her in a Pack ’n Play in the kitchen tonight,” he says.
“Maybe you should go sleep in a Pack ’n Play in the kitchen tonight,” I say.
I have crossed over to enemy territory. I have Stockholm syndrome. I kind of liked having her in the bed with me all night. At least we were all sleeping then. Looking through the gauze of my lobotomized, sleep-deprived brain, it’s hard to remember why I’m attempting to change things at all.
But David is right: enough is enough. We need to change back to the way things were. Because he is tired of the couch. Because we were all sleeping better six months ago. Because I am in charge, goddamnit, and it’s time I impressed that upon her somehow. Because, although she is cuddled up against me now in a fetal comma, Maggie is closer to two than to one. She is not a baby anymore.
I know that something will work eventually. Both of Maggie’s brothers went through stages when they woke up far too early, but I only remember that now because I wrote it in the baby calendars I dutifully kept on their changing tables. I don’t recall how it happened, but they don’t wake up at 4:00 A.M. now, so it ended at some point. If only Motrin and time cure the horrible Coxsackie, perhaps only coffee and time will cure this mother and her wakeful baby. Until then, letting her cry may be inhumane—against every fiber of my maternal being—but I humbly submit that in our inhumanity contest, the one being most cruel and barbaric, callous and ruthless, is the one of us weighing less than twenty-five pounds.
