by Laura June
The change in her was unmistakable, remarkable: she was a different baby after she passed the ten-week mark. And the change in me was pretty obvious too, once a few weeks of she’s-going-to-wake-up panic passed. I still sleep with a baby monitor nearby, and Zelda is three and a half. I still worry that she will wake in the middle of the night, but I can count on my fingers the number of times that has happened. She sleeps well when we travel, when we accidentally miss bedtime by a few minutes, when she’s in the car. She even slept well, the nurses marveled over how well, in a pediatric unit for a three-day pneumonia hospital stay when she was two years old. “Nobody sleeps eleven hours a night here!” the nurse cried, and I could see why, with them coming in every hour to check on her or give her oxygen, bells ringing and equipment humming. But my Zelda: she’s the best.
And I have the luxury of smiling when people tell me I “got lucky” with a good sleeper. Sure, I did; I know it. But I also put in a stiff five weeks of effort on her behalf, and I almost never deviate from her bedtime routine even now. It’s not negotiable. It’s my thing. And we all have benefited from it immensely.
I’m probably (I assume this is now obvious) prouder of getting Zelda to sleep well than anything else I’ve achieved as a parent. Did my own parents work this hard to get their kids to sleep? I have no idea. It’s lost to time. There are many ways to skin the cat; we both got there somehow.
When my brother John was still a baby, we shared a bedroom before we moved to McMurray. I remember once waking up early in the morning, and he was still asleep. I wandered over to look at him in his crib and woke him up. Not wanting to expose myself as a baby waker, I went downstairs to my mother, who was on the phone, and said, “The baby is awake.” She hung up her call and took me to the foot of the stairs, where you could sit and hear what was going on in the kids’ bedrooms upstairs. I used to occasionally catch her there, at the bottom of the stairs, just listening to what the four of us were doing up there. She leaned over and said to me, “Shhhh, listen.” I listened and could hear John upstairs in his crib babbling to himself. She took me back to the kitchen and got out the cereal for my breakfast.
“He’s fine up there,” she said. “Even babies need private time. If he’s not crying, it’s okay to let him there for a little while.”
I don’t have a huge store of these moments in my memory, just a few. But as I became a mother, actively learning how to parent, they bubbled up to the surface. How I remembered them changed or what they meant changed to me. It seemed my mother had given me just a little advice a really long time ago.
I’d always assumed this was some kind of laziness on my mother’s part, though lazy was not part of her character in any way. She was overworked with her kids, and so I didn’t judge, but even at five or six, I sort of thought, “Well, she doesn’t feel like getting him yet.”
But after Zelda was born and after she was sleep trained, I made a rule: I didn’t get up until 7:00 and get her out of bed, even if she was awake. I just let her loll around in there, and at first she cried sometimes. But then, very quickly, she stopped. Mostly she slept until 7:00, but there were occasional mornings when she simply woke up early and babbled to herself. Even for naps I made a policy of not immediately rushing in to her at the first signs of waking, because I realized, thirty years later, that my mother was right: the baby wasn’t just fine in there, she was actually doing something important. She was waking up. She was adjusting to being awake. And eventually, I started to notice that she seemed to be working on learning how to talk there, in her crib, all alone. “Ba ba ba ba ba,” you’d hear over and over, her feet in her hands.
“The baby’s awake!” anyone who was in the house would inevitably tell me anytime they heard her stirring, maybe expecting me to flutter up the stairs as fast as I could. But I didn’t, I don’t. The few times I did rush in to her, she cried and seemed generally unhappy to see me. It’s changed in the past few years, of course, and now that she can speak, well, her desires are not a mystery: “Mommy, I’m awake!” I hear some mornings. Sometimes I just get the opening strains of a song. But I know now for sure that my mother was right: babies need private time. And nothing made me prouder than the first day Zelda closed the door to her room, saying to me, “I just need some privacy.” (“I dusht need some primacy.”) Amen.
CHAPTER 6
◆ ◆ ◆
There was a long period of my childhood—say, from the time I was in third grade up through middle school—where, if I didn’t have Emily sleeping over, my mother got in bed with me at my bedtime and we lay together, each reading our own books. I can still see her there now, bathed in warm lamplight, laying on her stomach, propped up on her arms, staring down at a book.
I had a large double bed in my room, an antique bed that was hulking and a little weird compared to all my friends’ beds—regular modern twins—that my mother and my grandma Elly had bought together at a vintage store.
I never really questioned why my mother slept with me, and though I know now it was evidence of problems in my parents’ marriage, I accepted her explanation: my father worked very early, he went to bed earlier than she did, and he didn’t like the lights on when he was sleeping. My father is not a reader. I can sympathize with this arrangement, having been married for a decade: it’s very annoying if your schedules are at all out of sync and if one of you is a reader but the other is not. This is an underexplored topic of marriage, I feel. If you’re a reader paired off with a not-reader or, worse, an in-bed TV watcher paired off with a not-in-bed TV watcher, well, someone will have to give.
My mother was a reader. We spent quiet time together in bed reading side by side, not talking. This was something I knew I’d like to have with Zelda. An almost passive but meaningful part of my relationship with my mother was our love of books.
Some of the first things I bought for Zelda when I was pregnant, as I said, were books. It would be hard to overstate my attachment to my own books, as physical objects I must lug around and move with me and as emotional necessities. Whenever we travel, I often take a dozen books with me instead of the proper clothing, simply because I’m never sure what I’ll be in the mood for.
This is, I know, not a unique or outstanding feature. But I think it is the most important one about me.
And then the first meaningful interactions between Zelda and me were the long, sunny days spent in her bedroom where she, just fed and awake from a nap, would lay on her back in her crib and listen to me read. I didn’t feel completely natural carrying on a one-sided conversation with her, even though she was a few months old by then and we spent all our mornings together alone. We ventured out to meet Kim and Amy or other friends in the afternoons, but mornings were just ours, and I filled them, determined not to baby talk to her too much, by reading.
It was partly selfish, of course: I missed reading books, but at night after she went to bed I often found that I was too tired to read and ended up falling asleep in front of the television or just getting straight into bed at 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. Babies are so much more exhausting than people tell you, even the ones who, like Zelda, are “easy.”
And she was. “Oh, you have an easy baby,” everyone always told me. I could never quite tell if that was a compliment or an accusation, if it was said with admiration or with something else, something akin to jealousy but also the kind of competitiveness that happens to new parents, where having challenges stack up is a mark of how well you’re doing. Some claim that easy babies are easy through no doing of yours, but that’s not true, of course. I take some credit for Zelda’s good moods, mostly because I taught her to sleep as well as I myself sleep. But her good nature, her sunny disposition, I don’t take credit for that.
The hours we spent in the first year of her life there, in her room, in the mornings, are times I will never, ever forget. She humored me as I read. I started with little picture books with few words but realized very quickly that a book that
took two minutes to read wasn’t enough.
When I was pregnant, I had bought several books for her that I’d remembered fondly as a child. There sat on her shelf next to the white-noise machine and the board books, the stuffed animals and chew toys, ten or so chapter books I loved in fourth grade.
At random, and partly because it had some pictures I could show her, I chose to read Little House in the Big Woods to Zelda first. It took about a week to complete.
Reading aloud is an odd experience, especially when your audience is one person incapable of feedback. I read until she fussed and then gave up. At first she could listen only for two or three minutes without squirming around and making noise, trying to see where I was as I sat in a chair by the window or paced the short distance of her tiny bedroom. But soon she began to be quiet for much longer periods, and I found that she was listening to me.
I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Island of the Blue Dolphins, another problematic classic. I cried my way through The Little Prince and slogged through The Wizard of Oz, a book that I’d only thought I had read as a child, it turned out. Dorothy wasn’t my kind of girl, always whining to go home. I’ll admit my empathy level was possibly at an all-time low for anyone outside of that little room. “Oh, she’s crying for home again,” I thought to myself. But Zelda would eventually love the story and now often takes the book to bed with her. “I love The Wizard of Woz,” she says. “But not the bad witch.”
I read to her for hours, partly because I wanted to get rid of so many hours and partly because, I see now, I didn’t have much to say to her yet. Only in the space since my daughter has turned three years old have I ever begun to “miss the baby months,” as they say. And only a little bit at that. The baby phase was very hard for me. I bonded to her, I loved her, and she was very easy, always smiley, almost never crying, but still, I struggled through those months.
I thought of my mom in those hours I sat in Zelda’s bedroom, on the rug or in the armchair three feet from her crib, reading to her. My mother hadn’t struggled like this, or if she had, she hadn’t ever bothered to tell anyone. To hear her story, she was as happy as she’d ever been when there was a baby in the house. Only when we moved, when we were all finally in school and she had some of the peace and quiet I now often mourned the lack of, did she seem to falter.
I wasn’t yet sure what I was supposed to be doing. Zelda required constant attention when awake, as far as I could tell, but, beyond that, nothing taxed my brain. It felt like a marathon of boringness. I sometimes wondered at the veracity of my mother’s account of life with children. Though Zelda was fascinating and I could stare at her toes with amazement, there are so many hours in one single day. I’d never simply spent so much time with another person, not doing anything at all, no conversation, no real interactions. Just her and me, staring at each other, singing little songs, talking nonsense, reading books.
I see now that reading wasn’t the worst solution. I’m not sure whether Zelda got anything out of it. I told myself that I was helping her to learn patience and to listen, but really, I was just getting by. I didn’t feel unhappy; in fact, I think of those days very fondly, so lazy and full of nothing. But for the first time in my life that I could remember, I lacked a clear purpose. I had no vocation that I could see. Oh, I had to keep the baby alive, and she was stimulating in ways I’d never encountered before, but we were separate people, and her prerogatives overwhelmed my own. I read to her because I wanted to be reading, because I needed mental exercise, and this was the only time I could find for it.
It was the first time in my adult life where just living was the rule of the day. I’d left home at eighteen and worked and gone to school every day since then. I’d taken only two or three vacations in that time. I woke up mostly early and went to bed after midnight, filling the space between with work and reading and cooking. I’ve never been good at sitting and watching a movie—Josh has never gotten used to my multitasking habit of reading while watching TV—or just hanging around. When I wake up I immediately get dressed, brush my teeth, and head to the kitchen to begin my day.
Now that Zelda is a toddler, her pace and mine are aligned. We wake and begin, there are tasks, lunches to make, breakfasts to have, errands to run, and school to go to. But when faced with this first part of her life, before I’d figured out that we could venture into the wilderness together, we simply were.
I started taking her to the restaurant down the street from our house as soon as it got warm enough for us to walk the three blocks there. Sometimes we met Kim and Amy or another friend, but often we were alone. Weekend brunches were often stressful: Josh was home, and getting three people out the door is infinitely more complicated than getting two out. And of course in Brooklyn, Saturday or Sunday brunch was always crowded. But Zelda and I, we could manage on a weekday, sometimes barely, occasionally beautifully. Out and about was where I began to see how she and I would be together, to spy what our dynamic might be in the future.
At the end of that street we’d sit, at first inside because it was too cold, eventually at a little table outside once it was warm and sunny, and just look at each other. She’d sit in her giant stroller and, eventually, in a little wooden restaurant high chair. At first she’d have a bottle while I had coffee or wine, and later she’d eat her vegetable baby food pouches. I stared at her; she stared at me.
One afternoon we’d been out for a while at the park with Kim and Amy, who had headed home for dinner. It was fall; Zelda was probably seven months old. It had been a long day, as all days were then. I was tired, but bedtime, which was at 7:00 p.m., seemed so far away at that moment. Josh wasn’t going to be home before bedtime; it was only us. And as we passed the restaurant on our way home, on a whim, I stopped, parked the stroller, and sat down at a table.
A waiter came over and handed me a menu. Zelda looked up at me, smiling from her stroller, as I unlocked it and moved the seat upward so that she was “sitting.” I looked through my bag. I didn’t have any milk for her or even a bottle of water. I let her sip from my glass, which she always loved. Zelda was a self-feeder from day one, grabbing the spoon from my hand the first time I fed her solids. She let me hold her bottles for her for months longer than most babies, but she always grabbed for forks and adult glasses.
This water was seltzer, and she sputtered it out a little, then reached for more. I had a pouch of apricots, which she never really liked but which would do. I ordered a watermelon salad, hoping she would be open to sharing it with me. I looked around at the beautiful, waning day, the sun just going down over the East River, visible in the not very distant distance. One other person, a nicely dressed woman, was on the sidewalk sitting at a table, drinking wine. I ordered a glass of wine and drank my first sip too avidly, feeling the wine dribble down the front of my shirt. I looked down as I started to sponge it up with a napkin and noticed that my shirt was covered in other stains, not just the wine. There was old milk, maybe some tomato sauce. Was I still wearing my clothes from the day before?
I shuddered to think of my hair, which I’d stopped cutting and styling and which I washed only a few times a week. I looked like shit, I was sure of it. And for me, this is saying a lot, because even on my best days I look only moderately put together. I’ve never been a “good dresser.” Anyway, the woman sitting there alone at the table who shamed me simply by existing was reading The New Yorker. I had a stack of New Yorkers at home, by my side of the bed. I often pondered not reading them but simply tying them together with some heavy twine and throwing them onto the curb. When would I be able to read The New Yorker again? When would I want to? I still went to bed exhausted at 9:30 or 10:00 p.m. and was barely making time to start writing again. I was still drained and had little interest in showering. I didn’t feel unhappy, but I felt like a completely different person than the one who had decided, finally, to have a baby.
I thought the woman sitting there alone, with the good ha
ircut and the glass of wine, must be judging me somehow. She must feel very smug about her decision not to have kids or to remain happily single. I didn’t know anything about her other than that, and though I didn’t exactly envy her, I felt very certain she did not envy me. She caught me staring at her; we made eye contact. I looked away in what felt like shame and put my sunglasses on.
Down the street I could hear the familiar sounds of kids screaming, playing, wringing the last fun out of the end of the day. And in the distance, a crying baby.
As I looked down at Zelda, who had been fussing because she wanted ever-increasing volumes of seltzer, which I didn’t want to give her because there was no place to change her closer than home, a calm washed over her. She smiled. She looked around, not needing me, me not needing her. She gave me another moment to contemplate the disgusting figure we cut, as I noted her little striped sundress was covered in red stains, too.
“Strawberries!” I almost said aloud. We’d both eaten them for breakfast. That must have been what was on both of our fronts. Strawberries. We love strawberries.
The crying baby was getting closer, and in fact I could see it now, or its vehicle: a stroller identical to Zelda’s, an Uppababy Cruz, rolling toward us down the sidewalk. A man was pushing the stroller calmly and silently, as if the baby inside was not wailing its head off, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. “Must be a newborn,” I said to myself, looking down at my half-year-old baby with appreciation. One thing we had conquered: Zelda never screamed in her stroller anymore. I guess those days were over.
