Now My Heart Is Full

by Laura June

  “You have enough milk,” she declared, and this was indeed reassuring. “Feed her at the intervals I suggested, and I think she will have gained weight at her next appointment.”

  But she didn’t. When that appointment rolled around several days later, she was exactly the same weight as she’d been the previous week. I asked the doctor about bottle-feeding her formula. My breasts were filled with milk that the baby simply didn’t seem to be able to get out. I’d started pumping it, just to get it out. I was freezing it dutifully. The doctor agreed: “Feed the baby your bottled pumped milk or formula if you like after she has nursed. If she takes it, she’s still hungry.”

  I worried that this would confuse my daughter about nipples: that bottle-feeding would make her reject my boob because the bottle was so much easier. That was, after all, what I read on the mommy blogs, an internet-based hell world I had lived for decades not even knowing it existed. But in those days, I was steeped in its worries and conspiracy theories. I worried that Zelda might reject the formula because it tasted as bad as it smelled. And I worried a little that I would be judged by other mothers if they saw me out and about bottle-feeding.

  But I worried more that she wasn’t eating enough. I remember quite clearly the first night that I bottle-fed her—not even formula, but breast milk I had pumped in an effort to help a painful clogged duct I had. “I feel like she’s not eating enough and that’s why she’s unhappy!” I yelled into the phone to my husband, who was out desperately searching for some supply we needed. She was probably three weeks old. “Just give her the bottle. You’ll see how much she drinks; you’ll know she isn’t hungry,” he said. I took it over to her in her little basket, and she sucked down all three ounces in just a few minutes. I worried that I’d fed her too fast; that she would spit up. I worried that I’d sanitized the bottle wrong.

  But she didn’t spit up. She didn’t reject my boob, or the bottle, or even the formula I guiltily started feeding her weeks later when my freezer stash ran out, when my boobs were sucked and pumped dry. She couldn’t get enough to eat; she was hungry all the time. Every three hours like the consultant had said, I stuffed my breast into her mouth and she sucked whatever she could get for fifteen, thirty minutes. Then she sucked down a bottle, first three, then four, then five ounces.

  She began to gain weight rapidly, and the stress drained away from me. The doctor said, “Go for it,” when I told her I thought she could use a faster-flowing nipple on the bottles because it took so long to feed her one. She didn’t spit up. She didn’t reject anything. Any white fluid in a bottle she’d drain down; the brand didn’t matter. She would have taken milk straight from a cow or another woman’s breast. She was getting fat. She went from being in the tenth percentile for weight to the eightieth in the space of two months.

  I became, over the year or so that I read about breast-feeding issues and all the many politics surrounding our maternal bodies, something of a proselytizer for feeding babies however. “Whatever works!” I yelled to the women who told me that formula was not as good as breast milk. I decided that the most important thing for our family was that she ate enough, plain and simple. That she was not hungry, ever. This is the best advice I can give to other mothers.

  But I struggle still with the guilt put on women who need to, or choose to, feed their babies formula. I’m not sure that, given the opportunity to have another child, I wouldn’t go straight to a bottle of formula from the start. And though I know that this is a controversial position, it’s one that I feel very proud of holding: for me, breast-feeding was fraught with emotional difficulty. After weeks of feeling as though I was simply starving my daughter, the ability to measure sometimes felt like a great gift. The ability to know, week in, week out, that this little girl, who had been born a little early and was a little small through no fault of her own, was now gaining weight, was very important to me.

  Motherhood was challenging and tiring. I simply didn’t want to also have to worry that she was starving, on top of everything else that we faced.

  I didn’t want to admit I needed help with getting my daughter to sleep either, but the baby nurse I’d hired had shown me, in a small space of time, that babies could be encouraged to sleep without simply letting them scream in their cribs. I didn’t want to leave my baby alone in her bedroom with a stranger simply so that I could sleep, but I was so tired and sore that I relented. And I learned from her that sleep, for Zelda and for me, was possible.

  And so sleep became my next obsession, after I’d figured out how to feed the baby in a way that made everyone happy and full. I’d never read a baby sleep book before I was pregnant (why would anyone do that?), but while I was pregnant, the subject of sleep training had come up with Josh’s cousin, one of the only people in our families with small children. He mentioned using a book by Dr. Ferber with his two boys, so a few days later, I dutifully bought the new and revised edition of Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems by Richard Ferber. Next I tore through The Happiest Baby on the Block. But then, bored out of my mind and still only halfway through pregnancy, I gave up.

  I was barely sleeping at night, even though Zelda had slept a bit better since the nurse. The nurse had given me, in fact, my first taste of confidence as a mother, the kind of stuff I assumed would have come directly from my own mother, had she been alive. Her little nuggets of wisdom—“Don’t rush right over if you hear her stirring, you might wake her up”—were the first glimpse I had of something resembling a “schedule,” or a light at the end of what seemed at that time to be an endless tunnel. But these tips—to let the baby settle herself, to not panic or rush, to be sure she had a full stomach before putting her to bed—didn’t come from my mother. Maybe it was better that way; maybe I would have resisted my mother’s help. As it was, I accepted the nurse’s offered tips and took them to heart quickly.

  No one had actually prepared me for the loss of time I experienced as a first-time, new mother. People told me I wouldn’t sleep or shower, that I would worry over little nothings. All of it was true, and yet it wasn’t the major thing I experienced. What knocked me out of sync with the rest of the world was that I suddenly felt as though I was no longer a part of it. I’d always been a loner, going days sometimes without talking to anyone besides my husband, and if he went away on business, I sometimes saw no one at all. I had only a few close friends from childhood, and none who I was in constant contact with, none who lived nearby.

  And yet I was still unprepared for the level of isolation and time dissonance that I experienced when I was at home with Zelda for those first weeks and months.

  Suddenly there was no difference between day and night: I was being led by a crazy worm who seemed unsatisfied even with food and cuddling—the only things I could offer her in abundance. I followed her blindly for weeks, stumbling around in various postpartum sweat suits that even I, a rather slovenly, careless dresser, would normally not wear outdoors. It was so bitterly cold that even hardy New Yorkers seemed to have hunkered down for just exactly the few weeks that we were also adjusting to our new reality. I looked out the window forlornly and the streets were empty, the trees had no leaves. It seemed the sun didn’t come out from behind the clouds for days, which of course I knew would only make the baby’s nonexistent jaundice worse. “Put the baby by a window!” a website I read, laughing hard enough to choke seltzer out of my nose, unhelpfully suggested. There was no fucking sun, and it seemed to be twenty degrees colder near the windows.

  For the first time in years, I felt at sea even though I had lots to do: the laundry alone was constant. A newborn isn’t exactly a lot of physical labor, but it’s a constant drone of needing to be there, on, and paying attention. I could look at my phone a lot or read a bit of a book here and there, but I often found that I had no desire to. My daughter, such as she was, was very, very cute, but she had no personality to speak of that I could discern. I didn’t hold that against her! But I felt, especially i
n the long winter days that made up that first month and a half, the weight of loneliness for the first time in my adult life. Rather than cherish the quiet of winter alone, I sensed myself on the verge of losing it. Mostly because I was tired, I know now.

  The period where Zelda didn’t sleep was short. It was laughably short if I compare myself to many other mothers, although I broke down very quickly. By the time Zelda was a month or so old, I ordered a new spate of baby sleep books. And though I don’t remember who recommended the two that would come to form the core of my philosophy on baby sleep, I do remember, and will always keep on the shelves of my library, those two books. They are worth hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars to me.

  I need to stop here and explain why sleeping infants are such a big deal. And I also need to say, though I’m sure I’ve already explained: I fucking love to sleep. I don’t know what my parents did with their house full of four children all pretty close in age, but we all sleep like logs. I remember my father tucking me in at night, and I remember waking up in the morning. I do not recall any up-all-nights, aside from that story about the puzzles and the occasional illness. We were, the four of us, robustly healthy, good sleepers. That said: I know nothing of their methods, and all the parents of the ’70s and ’80s I’ve asked about sleeping have been, it’s no exaggeration to say, a little mysterious about their methods. “Oh, she was just a great sleeper,” they’ll say. Or, if you ask about babies crying in the middle of the night, they’ll deny that ever happened. “Let them cry? No, never.” I’ve come to believe, after the arduous work of teaching my own daughter to sleep, that parents lie, they forget, and those who raised children in the pre–baby monitor eras had an easier time of it.

  At home with my newborn in our technologically advanced hell house, we could hear every errant gas passing and sigh. And of course, at first, besides those nights with the baby nurse, we’d sleep with Zelda in a bassinet beside our own bed, often waking her when we came to bed at 10:00 p.m. We realized this quickly, so at first we simply gave in and got into bed at 7:30 p.m. and lay there, plastered to the bed, trying not to move or make any noise, knowing all the while of course that she’d be awake in less than an hour anyway.

  And that’s why sleep is such a huge deal to parents: babies don’t know how to do it. They don’t have a clue. There’s a period when they’re first born, which lasts a week or so, which I refer to as “the lie,” where they sleep happily and sort of soundly wherever you leave them—a couch, a box, whatever. But that ends hard and fast and soon, and you’re screwed because you simply didn’t know, if you’re like we were. No one told me: babies don’t know how to sleep. You need to help them.

  And that was when I realized, through searching the internet, that, like breast-feeding, sleep training, closely associated with a technique called “cry it out” (you can, I believe, gather what it requires from its name), is a vast political war among parents of the current era. And it’s fucked up.

  There are two schools of thought on sleep training: those who say you can and should start it around two months of age up to about six months of age, and they are mostly backed up by research, modern medicine, and every pediatrician I’ve ever talked to. There are a million sleep-training techniques (hence all those books on Amazon.com), but most of them eventually involve a little “crying it out,” where you simply let the baby cry in its crib in the hopes that it will fall to sleep on its own and forget to wake up. It sounds as though it won’t work, but believe me, it does. I know dozens of parents who have done it, and our pediatrician, who runs a massive practice, swears by doing it at as early an age—eight weeks—as possible, simply because younger babies cry for fewer nights than older ones, who’ve been on the planet longer and know more, do.

  The other camp, which has a large crossover in the Venn diagram with the breast-feeding-only camp, the organic-only camp, the no-sugar camp, the possibly anti-vaxx crowd, suggest that crying is bad for babies. There is very little evidence to back this up, but they say it anyway. They also say— I’ve heard them say it to me—that sleep training doesn’t “work.” That each baby is different, that you have to re–sleep train often, etc. I didn’t know what to think, but my gut told me that simply “going with the flow” and “letting the baby guide me,” as the no-sleep-train crowd suggested, was simply insane. No one was happy there in the house when we were all under-slept.

  But I hoped to find a middle ground. I wanted to sleep train Zelda. I believed that sleep training her was for her own good. I could tell, even very early, that she was fussy, not because she was naturally hungry or miserable but because she was exhausted and didn’t know how to stay asleep long enough to actually feel refreshed. But I didn’t really relish the idea of letting her cry for a few nights in a row. She was, when I started my sleep-training research, too young as far as my pediatrician was concerned anyway: as I said, she recommended waiting until babies were eight weeks old and a certain weight in order to ensure they didn’t actually need to eat in the middle of the night. But then I found a book that suggested I could start her sleep-training journey earlier—at birth, actually, if I’d discovered it then—with no crying involved.

  The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems is in my top five books I’ve ever read, alongside Jane Eyre and The Blind Assassin. It’s the most important book I have ever owned. Because it worked. I read this book cover to cover when Zelda was about five weeks old and immediately decided to try out the author’s system, even though it was intense. Actually, the fact that the Baby Whisperer, whose real name was Tracy Hogg, had so many goddamned rules was probably what drew me to her insanity. A small sampling of her technique includes the fact that the infant should almost always sleep in its bed—not a stroller or a rocker—overnight as well as for naps. This means, essentially, that while the process of sleep training is going on, you’re chained to the house. She isn’t totally specific on how long each baby will take to “sleep through the night,” but says they usually get to that by three months of age. Literally can’t leave almost ever, because infants sleep so often. She also suggested that the baby sleep in its own room, outfitted with blackout shades and a white-noise machine. She insisted that there be a bedtime routine that was exactly the same every single night. That the baby went to sleep at very specific intervals after being awake for very specific periods of time. Feeding must happen when the baby wakes up, not when it’s going to sleep, which is a secret weapon of most new mothers: feed the little shit to sleep. No, no, said Tracy. That would be an “unhealthy” sleep association. I hated Tracy, but I felt compelled to test her.

  At first, her schedule (which she insists is not a schedule, but it totally is) seemed insane. One day, a week or so into it, Josh said, “This is crazy, this is miserable, what are we even doing this for?” but I persisted. “Give me until eight weeks,” I said. If, when we got to eight weeks and we took her to the pediatrician and she was still sleeping badly, waking up every three hours, I’d admit failure and we’d do the fast-and-easy cry it out.

  I trusted Tracy, as I trusted the baby nurse before her, because I investigated enough to know that on a basic level what she was saying made a lot of sense. But because Tracy was not accessible to me in any way, I couldn’t get her feedback: I was on my own, floundering around, rereading the same passages questioning myself. I needed her authority, I needed her confidence, and because I didn’t have a mother of my own, Tracy became almost a real person in my mind. She was distant, she seemed to know everything, and, in the end, I had nobody but myself to blame if it didn’t work.

  It didn’t seem to be working for those first few days, as I dutifully noted each time she ate, how much she ate, when she went down, when she woke up. Every day of that time period is etched on me like a tattoo. It was miserable at first. I’d do what Tracy said, get Zelda into her crib “awake but drowsy” for a nap, leave the room, and she’d wake up twenty-four minutes later. I wanted to scream a lot for those fe
w days. I’d drag myself up the stairs, my body feeling heavy, my mind full of the doubt that I dared not admit even to Josh. Jesus, this couldn’t possibly work.

  But about a week after we started, she got a little better. And by the time she was eight weeks old, she was down to waking just once a night, around 2:00 in the morning. The pediatrician told us we could let her cry at night now if we wanted. I said I thought she might actually sleep through the night on her own; she was just waking up once at night to eat, and she seemed very hungry then. The doctor gave me good advice: “Why don’t you try letting her cry at the beginning of sleep if needed, to go down, but not in the middle of the night if you’re not ready yet?” I decided to try that. Zelda cried one or two nights at bedtime, for fifteen minutes each. She’d already gotten used to our routine, and part of Tracy’s entire scheme was in fact to ensure that when you tried to put your baby to bed, she was actually tired anyway, so she would fall to sleep easily. Zelda by then had been on this routine for a few weeks, and she was indeed very tired at naps and bedtime. After that, there was almost never any bedtime crying.

  By ten weeks, my daughter began sleeping “through the night” as they say, on her own, without ever “crying it out”: from about 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. I could tell you how that came to be, but it would be a book in itself. I took notes and obsessed for a month. I worried about nothing else. We barely left the house to get the napping schedule just right. But at the end of it, I was gifted a great sleeper, a baby who rarely—maybe ten times in her entire life—wakes up after we put her to bed. We were gifted an even happier kid, who was so rarely cranky or crying. We were gifted our nights to do with as we wished. At first I mostly slept, of course. I went to bed sometimes moments after she closed her eyes.