In a dark silent room we wait with bated breath. Anticipation is building. She made a noise, the coo of a morning dove, not loud but audible above the white noise machine in the corner. The air is suddenly tense. The dogs perk their ears up, and we straighten our spines. I slowly roll from my back to my side to get a good look, the feeling of inevitability setting in as the coos continue. She’s lying on her back, her pelvis tilts and she lifts her legs in the air. The movements jerky but not frantic, as if she’s peddling an invisible bicycle. “Uhhhck”, a noise that’s a cross between a grunt and a cough.
A mental check-list swims through my sleep-deprived mind. I pour over it like a basketball coach looking through statistics trying to determine why their all pro player is in a shooting slump. Temperature is good. I’m comfortable without a shirt under just a thin topsheet. Darkness, nearly complete. No sounds beside the white noise. Time since she went down, only 20 minutes. Awake time after her last nap, 1 hour and 20 minutes. Exercise? Check, tummy time and we even took her outside while the dogs did their business. A Chilly 18 degrees, snow on the ground, immediate yawns when we came back inside. Perfect, so how can this be unraveling!?
And then a miracle, slowly her legs descend almost all the way down. They hover, frozen a half inch above the mattress just the way she likes it. Her hands which have traveled seemling at random to somewhere above her head also cease their movement, frozen at what seems like an awkward angle, but her movement has stopped. Her breathing becomes regular. I grasp Helen’s hand in the dark and give it a squeeze which she returns. We don’t let go. 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 2 minutes! Finally we separate, roll back onto our backs. The tension exits my body and sleep comes almost immediately.
She is 17 days old and she has broken us. Tamed, trained and reduced to submission. The taming began at birth, or perhaps before. When I first held her in my arms I loved her with all my heart. When I held her skin against mine, her body laying against my chest I felt the hormones kick in immediately, like a drug. Like there was some communication between our hearts that expanded my capacity.
Objectivity became a struggle, then a memory. She is beautiful, she is perfect. She spent her first 18 hours in blissful almost unbroken sleep. Rarely opening her eyes, she gave no response to stimuli except for feeding, voracious and brief before again falling into a deep sleep. Her body easily lifted with one hand, wherever we put her she slept, and the more she slept against our skin the more we craved her, loved her, needed her.
Then came the first night, or more accurately the second morning. Some time past midnight but before the sun was up she unleashed her second great source of power. Like a martial artist using the perfect pressure point to knock a powerful fighter unconscious with a single blow, she unleashed a cry so finely tuned to stir us to action that to ignore it would be impossible. A biological weapon, a siren call that demands action with an urgency that shuts out all other thoughts. A demand to return to the present moment and attend to her needs with an immediacy similar to the need to return to the surface for air before one drowns.
I thank her for making us love her first. Because there are moments of darkness between that first night and now when she deploys that horrible cry for hours at a time. And I must make it stop because that is the only thing that matters, and I am furious because I cannot think. Sleep deprivation and that horrible noise have removed all rationality except that I love her and therefore I must serve her, rather than repel her.
So we begin to train ourselves. Initially, in our hubris we believe we can maintain a relatively normal night/day cycle. Sleeping through the night in shifts, with feedings every three hours. I watch a basketball game from 9 until midnight when she is fed, holding her against my chest. Then I lay next to the bassinet where she sleeps and calm her when she wakes until 3 AM when she feeds again. Then the bassinet and baby roll to the other side of the bed where Helen is in charge from 3 AM until 9 when the coffee maker brings itself to life and delivers our salvation. Our sleep measured in the milileters.
She lets us know that we are no longer in charge and that our choices about when and how long to sleep are of no consequence to her. She wakes frequently, and refuses to be put down. We are no longer in control. We must adapt to her reality, her schedule. Her very unintentionally shields her from any feelings of resentment as we strategize at the whiteboard in our living room. How can we best meet her needs? What sleep schedule would please her? How might we make her most comfortable? When we fail to adapt she punishes us without malice. When we succeed she rewards us without intention. The work simply must be done and we are the ones capable of doing it. So we train ourselves, and we are broken.
Always Hungry 