Those first nights when we brought you home, I found that though you slept in a cradle at our feet, I could not easily get out of our bed to fetch you when you cried, and so I slept on the office couch. I have not slept in that bed since the night my water broke in it, and it no longer feels like I belong in it. We tried to keep you where you were, in a separate room from me so that I wouldn’t be awaked by your every single fretful newborn quiver and jerk, but it just proved much more easy for me to wake with you when you were close, so after a couple of nights we put your cradle in the office with me. We have not spent a night apart since, and this will not last forever, indeed it can’t last much longer, because your daddy is my bed partner and not you – but I do love it and I will be sad to see it end.
Those nights you woke often – every one hour, or two – crying your newborn cry, and turning your head this way and that, this way and that, looking for the nipple. Like a baby bird, you spent most of those nights with your neck craned, mouth open, eyes closed. Feed me, mommy, so that my stomach will stop hurting and I can sleep again. And so I would get up, dragging myself back from the edge of sleep, which is usually all the further I got to – the edge, never dropping over the cliff into slumber, only dancing on the ridgeline, ready to snap to attention as soon as your need was broadcast to me through your wide open baby-bird mouth. I would roll, gingerly, out of the couch, doing my best to protect my tender parts, and struggling because I lacked any semblance of core strength. My stomach muscles were flaccid from lack of use, and I flailed, and often thought to myself what a joke it was that I, in my delicacy, was left in charge of you. Tiny you. Both of us helpless. Fumbling through the nights together.
So I would fetch you from your cradle, and go back to the couch to sit on the boppy while I propped you up using other pillows. Your back was a straight arrow, your little diapered rump fitting in my one hand. You were so tiny. We still had to work on getting a good latch in those days, so I had to wake all the way up to manipulate your wee mouth to where it needed to go. I remember how you would bear down, close your eyes and furrow your brow and focus on getting that milk, and usually your tiny button nose would get squished up against my skin, and it would take you a minute to realize this before you shifted your head to get a breath. And then you’d suck in a huge breath, and choke, and snort milk everywhere, and oh, we were always a glorious mess. Many were the nights that we would both fall asleep, and I would wake up an hour later with you in my arms, my back muscles clutched in the biggest charley horse from holding you like that, but somehow in my sleep I still didn’t let you go. I’d put you back in your cradle when you fell asleep, so I could get my own ten minutes or so of shut-eye. Except that usually around 4 or 5 am, the last dark-time feeding before dawn, I would lay down on the couch, my head propped with pillows, and let you sleep on my chest. You liked this because you could hear my heartbeat, hear me breathe, just like in the womb – I liked this because, oh darling, one day you will know what it is to hold your sleeping baby on your chest, and I won’t have to explain. We would lay like this, faling in and out of sleep, until the sun came all the way up, and Dad would come in then and bring me coffee, and hold you himself, and sometimes I would try to sleep a bit then.
It is a truly unnerving and surreal experience to have no defined night sleep. I have heard some women with newborns dread the setting of the sun because it means the long and awful night is ahead, but I did not. It was unusual to no longer have a bed time, or a sleep time – it was just time, 24 hours of it, whirring round the clock, ticking down the minutes between your feedings. I slept in ten or twenty minute jags. Between waking with you, putting you down to sleep, and then waking with a start because I wanted to be sure you were ok, I slept almost not at all those first few weeks. Eventually, in order to spare myself, I brought you to my bed. Although your wiggles and noises and tossing and turning would wake me, I still slept better. I could sense your breathing, and I feel like you could sense mine, and this kept you breathing normally. The fear of SIDS was always on my mind, and still is.
So our evenings would go like this: everyone else would go to bed, leaving you and me in the office. I would fetch my breast pads, my lanolin, blankets, burp rags, the boppy, my pain medication, a pillow and blanket, a large cup of water, the tv remote, my phone, and have them all within reach. You would be dressed in your diaper and swaddle, in your cradle. The ceiling fan would be on. I would turn out all the lights and put in Planet Earth, at first, and then when I had exhausted all of those discs I started putting in Rome. I kept these DVDs playing all night, on low, and it served as a sort of night light for us, and also kept me from feeling alone, and the low level noise from it allowed me to sleep much more easily than if it had been completely quiet. If I sit still for a minute I can conjure up the exact feeling I had on those long nights, watching the broad sweep of the dark Earth pan past the screen to a swell of music, watching for your chest to rise and fall, exhausted and so deeply, deeply happy. I cannot describe how precious those nights were for me, even as they wore my body ragged. I hope that I can always recall so clearly the first few weeks of nights that I had with my first born child, because I know it will never feel precisely the same, and it was a feeling of fulfillment and contentment – like, this is what I was born for. This is what I was made for. At last I am here.