They Seemed to Shine

On Saturday night, Henrietta slept through the night for the first time. No waking at 1:30 to cry it out. She just slept, and in the morning, when she woke up, I felt like she was my best friend and we had been reunited after a long and beautiful journey. If she were a little older, I would have begged to hear every detail of her dreams. I was so in love with her.

I set her in her highchair with a scattering of Cheerios so I could make my breakfast, and took pictures of her. Her sleep-through-the-night photo shoot.

And it was probably just my extra sleep, but at church that day, I somehow knew so much better how to deal with her. She sat on my lap through the first meeting, and I kept a steady stream of toys coming. One at a time: a block, a car, a little ball, another block, a zebra. A container of cereal puffs which I let her reach in to get for herself. She lounged on my lap, her bare feet rising now and then, and the flutter of the flower on her headband was movingly beautiful. It's when I noticed the headband flower's beauty that I thought, "This is what it must feel like to be rested. I'm rested. I must be rested."

When they brought the sacrament around--pinches of bread and water in little clear cups--I realized she would probably enjoy participating. It's the first time I've ever given her the sacrament, and I admit that at first it was just to buy us a few extra minutes. When you have an active baby/kid, you'll do just about anything to buy a couple minutes. I took a piece of bread for me, and another for her, and gave it to her. And quickly enough, the importance of what I was doing, the meaning of it, blossomed in my chest. I remembered being a kid, taking the bread and water when it passed, keeping the cup and playing with it until my mother took it away. I flashed through my adulthood, sitting every Sunday in those benches, taking the sacrament. I thought of all of the Sundays I had rushed to church, hoping to just make it in time for that ritual, and of all the Sundays it meant something to me, even when my faith was parched, nearly dried up. I thought of taking the sacrament in a youth hostel common room in Scotland with my BYU study abroad group, Loch Lomand still and magnificent out the picture windows.  I thought of being on bed rest when I was pregnant with Henrietta, and the men from my ward who came and knelt at the end of my couch, blessing a slice of bread and a cup of water from my kitchen, Henrietta moving inside of me while I listened to them pray.

She took the bread from my hand, and fed it to herself, splitting the piece in two to make it last. When the water came, I tipped it up to her mouth, and it spilled a little. Beads of water landed on her chin and neck, and in the lights of the chapel, they seemed to shine.

The Post On Sleep

My favorite picture. Possibly ever.

There are two things you should know before I tell you this story: the first is that I'm a lousy sleeper. I'm one of the lousiest, and I wear earplugs, these ones, or I would never sleep at all. This allows me to hear the baby when she's actually making significant noise from the other room, and not just fluttering her eyelashes, which I swear I'd hear. And the other thing you should know is that our bed is broken in a sort of complicated way, so I can only sleep with my head where my feet should be or I dream that I'm sleeping on a mountainside all night long--really, that happened.

But lately I haven't been sleeping much anyway. Not with earplugs, not with my head where my feet should be or anywhere else. Henrietta has been breaking records in the wake-up-at-night department. Gosh, it's been awful. She's teething, surely, but it's gotten worse and worse, and a few nights this last week she woke up 10-15 times (I lost count), at least once an hour but sometimes twice or thrice an hour, and then when she finally would sleep, I wouldn't be able to anymore, so I'd be up most of the night and then I'd walk around during the day pretty delirious, and fiending for a nap, and treating Sam terribly. My house is so dirty that I started to wonder if the baby wasn't sleeping because she contracted some rare non-sleeping disease from my carpet. My body was so exhausted that I was losing physical coordination; I was afraid to drive. And my brain was so tired that my mean voice was out with daggers.

One book I read on sleep said to ask yourself, before you begin sleep training, if your baby's night wakings were really ruining your life, or if they were manageable. Because two times a night? That's maybe not a big deal. But two times a night for months on end starts to make you insane. And remember? HP was going for 15. And she wasn't too hot or too cold, and I had gone down the list of every other thing that could be wrong. And we were giving her Tylenol and Ibuprofen to help with the teething pain. I spent half of my waking life (which was sup-par, admittedly) trying to figure out this sleep thing, and if it was something other than the fact that she was absolutely incapable of getting herself back to sleep without me, I would have figured it out. Trust me.

Ever since Henrietta was born, we've been talking about sleep-training. People ask you: is she sleeping through the night? And at some point it starts to feel like they're not groaning sympathetically with you anymore, they're wondering what's wrong with you that the answer is no. No and no. So I've been trying to read books (which is what I do when I don't know something), but those books are so formulaic and so guaranteed-to-work (!) and they basically said every single thing we were doing in relation to sleep was wrong, and the thought of changing everything and following a formula and keeping notes when I was already so sleep-deprived that the dishes made me cry? That really wasn't happening. So I talked to a lot of people and I prayed a lot, which are the other things I do when I don't know something. And I think I knew, I think I've known for awhile, that I just needed to let her cry and figure out how to get herself back to sleep. I've known this would be terrible experience.

And of course, because I'm me, I've been trying to work out whether I was that sort of person. I mean, was I even the cry-it-out kind of mom? I've talked about this before, how I can never just make decisions about what's best for my baby. I'm always putting all mothers (figurative mothers, not the real ones) in this binary system, and there are the good mothers who wake up and nurse their babies very sweetly every time they cry until they magically stop waking up in the night, and there are the other mothers who let their babies cry it out, and they are not very good mothers. Wait! Remember I really only mean figurative mothers! If you let your baby cry it out, I actually think you are brilliant and I'm jealous of you, because you get to actually sleep, and you are still a good mom because I know you are. You defy reality, but only because this binary doesn't exist in reality. It's baloney. Welcome to my world, which is full of baloney.

Sam and I tried letting her cry it out last Sunday night. I had fed her and rocked her, and she still wasn't settling down in any kind of permanent way. It was clear, maybe for the first time, that there was nothing I could do for her. I couldn't help her sleep, not really, and it was nearly ten at night, and so we just set her down and told her we loved her and tiptoed out. We sat in our office, trying to be cool, but listening to make sure she didn't launch herself over the side of her crib somehow. She screamed. She screamed loud and long and heartbreakingly until she was coughing and seemed like she could hardly breathe, and the minutes felt absurdly long. We went back in to tell her it was okay after three minutes, even though we had agreed to wait until five. And then we waited five more minutes, at which point I was sobbing, and Sam was saying, "I didn't understand. I didn't know it was going to be like this." We went in and I held her and rocked her until she slept, and I left her bedroom feeling like a sleep-training dropout. Sam and I prayed together out loud, taking turns, asking for help, begging for help. When I went downstairs I looked at my cat, who was sleeping soundly, and thought that at least our cats sleep through the night (and day) without help. We've got that going for us. We're not total failures.

Yesterday I called my sister, which is another thing I do when I don't know something. And I was asking her what I was supposed to do about Henrietta not falling asleep in the car anymore and screaming the whole way everywhere we went. And she answered that question, and then sort of volunteered, "Let me make a case for letting her cry it out at night." And she did. And somehow this solved all of my identity issues, and helped me really believe that helping Henrietta sleep on her own was a big giant gift to her, and I could give it, and it would be okay.

I entered last night's bed time ready for it. We did our bedtime routine, and then I fed her, and she was still awake when I set her down. She fell asleep on her own without too much fuss, and then she woke up at one, which wasn't too bad, considering the other nights we've had this week. I went in and picked her up before I thought very clearly, and she thrashed and wiggled and wailed in my arms, wanting milk, which I wasn't going to give her. She pooped, which she never does at night, and I swear it was in protest: pay attention to me; give me what I want. I changed her diaper very calmly, and told her she was going to go back to sleep now, and it was going to be okay. I lay her down in her crib and told her I loved her, and left.

I lay down in bed, my feet by my bedside table, and watched the clock, and the minutes weren't as long. Sam snored next to me, but it was suddenly clear it was all my job anyway, that it had always been, and it needed to be. My heart was pounding and her cries were painful to listen to, but I felt like I was being sort of carried above them, floating just above my bed. I had prayed countless times that when it was time to let her cry it out I'd be able to do it, and He was answering, helping me through every second of it, making it clear I was doing the right thing, that I was helping her, even if it didn't sound that way.

I felt like I was being swept back to a memory of when Henrietta was about a month old and I was taking her to church for the first time. I was bustling around the house trying to get everything together and I had strapped her into her carseat so I could have my hands free, and she was screaming. I thought she was probably tired, and I knew she'd fall asleep in the car, but I didn't know what to do in the meantime. It was the first time since she'd been born that running to her and fixing whatever was wrong was not possible; it was not the best thing for her or for me. I don't know how to explain what a terrifying revelation that was for me: immediately doing everything to fix what was wrong would not always be possible; it would not always be the best way to do my job as mother. I love new-mom self, I really love her for being so astonished and sad about that. And last night, I felt like that again. I remembered how as soon as I stepped out the door into the sunlight she fell asleep and everything was fine, and it made me feel like this cry-it-out thing would resolve itself.

And it was. She cried for half an hour. I went in twice to tell her everything was as it should be, and I felt like a warrior mother, steeled against her tears, doing the best thing for all of us. She screamed and then she cried and then she whimpered and eventually she stopped altogether and she slept, and I wanted to run through my house laughing and hollering and kissing the cats on the lips. But instead I put my earplugs back in and went to sleep, and slept, with a few brief exceptions, until morning. When I could tell the sun was coming up, and I thought I was maybe hearing her, I pulled up the edge of my earplug to check, and realized I was hearing songbirds. Songbirds, not my screaming baby. I looked over at Sam's legs beside me. I'd gone to bed the night before sort of irritated with him. Not in any meaningful way, but just an I'm-so-exhausted way, but now he was so beautiful in the morning light. He was sleeping on his stomach, and his toes were tucked between the mattress and the bottom of the bed, and his calves were somehow the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen. They were so long and so lovely that if I wasn't worried it would wake him, I would have run my hands very slowly from his ankles to his knees.

Announcing a Move

On a Friday a month or so ago, Sam and I were driving to the art museum in Worcester. It was sunny and glorious outside, and we were talking, again, about Sam's dread for the coming school year. He's been on paternity leave, as I've mentioned, but he's dreaded the end of that leave every single day, and we've discussed his dread most days. The job is a bad fit for a number of reasons, few of which I'm interested in going into here. We thought that a move closer to the school would help (his commute was horrendous previously), but it hasn't, so as we talked, driving along, I said what I had started to say when this subject came up, "Don't go back then. We'll figure something out. Don't go back."

Prior to that Friday, this would lead to some circling around the possibilities, and end with one of us saying, "No, it'll never work. We can't do it. We'll stay one more year and see how it goes. It's bound to get better." But for some reason, this time, we said, okay, yeah, let's not go back; we'll figure it out. Sam took one hand off the wheel and said, "Shake on it? We're really leaving?" And I took his hand and said, sure, yeah, let's go.

And then I panicked. Very quietly, silently even. In the passenger seat. What about, um, employment, and health insurance, and how would we have enough money for a cross-country move? You know, the little things.

Sam didn't panic. He immediately started bidding farewell to the area. "This might be the last time we ever go to this museum. And I'm okay with that," he said. "Look, see that intersection? No more of that," he said. "We're getting out of here. We're getting out of here," he nearly chanted. I could see the dread lift from him. It was like he became a different person, a person I hadn't seen in awhile.

Which means I wasn't willing to say, "Well, maybe I shouldn't have shook on it?"

That night, after we'd talked it over more, I asked if we could pray about it together. I was still willing to say we'd move, but inside I wasn't so sure. I generally ask God what He thinks of our plans, at least our big ones, and I had yet to talk it over with Him. Sam said he was willing to listen while I prayed aloud, but he had already made his decision; he wasn't sure what we needed to consult God about.

We sat on our couch and I bowed my head and he crossed himself and I started praying. I'm not sure what I expected. Not much, honestly. Usually answers like these take me some time, and the most I get from a single prayer is some clarity of thought, which is needed, but generally it's just a piece of the puzzle.

This time, almost as soon as I started praying, I got the whole puzzle. Or enough of it to completely change my tune. I don't think I have ever gotten such a quick and powerful and clear answer to prayer. And now that I write this out, I'm realizing God answered me by showing me how much I love Sam, by opening up an understanding of how miserable he had been and how miserable he stood to be if we stayed, and urging me to throw everything I had into this change, into this move. To get started immediately; that we couldn't leave soon enough. It was time to go.

I've been on board ever since, and it's been incredible to see what has opened up in the wake of our decision. We decided we'd head for Tucson, since Sam has family there who can help us land on our feet, and we won't be far from my family either. We'll be cobbling an income together with freelance and something like adjunct teaching, which is a bit scary, but hopefully doable. Sam's brother happened to see an ad in the paper a few weeks ago, asking for creative writing teachers for a new community outreach program at the local university. We sent in course proposals, and it looks like we'll both have an opportunity to teach through that program, and we are so excited about it. We'll be teaching what we love, to people who really want to learn it, in a completely low-pressure situation. When I think about that, I am a bit giddy. I really miss teaching.

I could go on about why and how this is the right move, and why I'm sure of it, even if I'm worried about the details sometimes. I probably will go on and on, but for now, I think it's enough to announce the plan. We're heading West, to write, more than anything. We want a life with more flexibility, more ability to raise our daughter together, more people around to love her and squeeze her and witness her magnificence. I have loved this area, and I will miss the people here that I love, but I am ready for big big skies and mild winters (!). I'm a California girl at heart. This move will get me closer.

I keep thinking about something a friend wrote in a card she gave us when we married. She said that when you find someone you love, you jump off a cliff together, and this seems true to me. Every couple jumps into their new life together, hoping it will work and making their plans. And sometimes, when you thought you were settled, you find you have to start over again, to jump again. Last Friday I sat in the car with the baby, waiting for Sam to quit his job, and I went back and forth between thinking we must be crazy and remembering a multitude of conversations with Sam over a multitude of meals, and thinking, "Of course he's quitting; of course we're leaving; of course of course. We were always meant to leave now. Everything has pointed to this all along. It's time."

In Wonderland: Thoughts on Alice

Watching Alice

Maybe it was all of your awesome comments on my last post, or maybe it was a late morning talk with my mom and a nap while Henrietta napped, but ultimately today was better. Sam is still struggling to bounce back, spending his days in bed, for the most part. So it was all me again this afternoon. And somehow, I didn't hate it. She was giggly today. I bent and unbent my legs after our naps, and she laughed hysterically. I minced my fingers toward her nose and she laughed hysterically. I sang her little songs, and she laughed hysterically. I could get used to that.

It occurred to me that she might want to watch The Brave Little Toaster, a show I used to enjoy when I was a kid. But they didn't have it on Netflix, so we watched the old Disney version of Alice in Wonderland instead. She sat on the rug and watched it, really watched it, her face turned up to the television as if she were seven and not seven months. It's the first time I've ever put a kid's show on for her, and it was strange to watch it through her eyes, to see what it means that these movies are made for kids--bright colors, lively music, singsongy voices.

And then, when it ended, we started it over, because, why not? I sat her on my lap with a tupperware of Cheerios and it felt very peaceful and sweet to sit there with her, watching her chubby yet long fingers chase the Os around. On the second time around, Henrietta laughed at the part where Giant Alice cries Giant tears, then swims in them, and I started to think about that, about crying tears that get too big for us, so we have to swim in them. "Oh dear," says Alice. "I do wish I hadn't cried so much."

It felt good to keep thinking about Alice, to write out some thoughts, to put images and words together. Maybe it's a (prose) poem. Maybe it's nothing. At any rate, it's below.



Curtsy While You're Thinking; It Saves Time

Poor Alice. She's muddled about who she is. She's a monster; she's a weed. She's the white rabbit's Mary Anne. She's too big and then too little and too big and too little again. The world is bright and colorful and it sings for her, but it wants to tell her the rules, wants her to follow them without knowing what they are. Who are you? Who are you? They ask until she doesn't know anymore. Her dreams outpace her, menace over her; she manages to offend them. The hare celebrates nonexistence and the caterpillar blows technicolor smoke in her face. When she asks questions, it's clear she should know the answer.  I'm afraid I'm not myself, she says. I'm afraid. I'm not myself. Household objects grow eyes and legs and menacing necks. It gets dreadfully dark. And still her pinafore stays starched and white, her blue dress buttoned to the top, her hairbow in place, her diction and manners impeccable. She runs faster. Alice, wake up, she begs. Please wake up, Alice.

Fearful Things

Henrietta, as best we can tell, is only afraid of one thing. She's not afraid of any of the things we expect her to be; she isn't afraid of the cats, or strangers (she lives for strangers), or the edge of the couch, or of falling while climbing our staircase. She's afraid of this little wooden train whistle that belongs to Sam. He put it in her room, thinking she'd find it charming, but the other night when he made it whistle, she burst into tears. Our willful little seven-month-old is inexplicably afraid of a train whistle.

I'm thinking about fear today, since it's what I felt for a good bit of it. And just as inexplicably, in a way. It's a fear I've actually been waiting for, a fear I've been anticipating for most of my life: the fear of caring for a child by myself at home during the day. I remember thinking about it a lot as a teenager and in college. I could not understand how I would survive a day with its mouth wide open ahead of me, all alone with a baby or a small child. I couldn't imagine anything more empty and depressing. I wanted kids; I just didn't know how I would get out of bed. (I think this was, in part, what I worried about when I left my job to be at home with Henrietta.)

I've been spoiled since Henrietta was born. Sam's had paternity leave, and aside from night-wakings, we've split this parenting thing pretty 50/50. We spend our days trading off taking naps when we really need them. When we need to run errands, often we all go together. We're so accustomed to doing this together that when we're on our own, we have trouble figuring out how to take a bathroom break; we're so used to just handing her off. It has not been a bad gig at all, really. I feel guilty for any complaining I've done.

But today, with Sam still recovering from his stay in the ER, I had my first taste of being at home for a good bit of the day alone with a baby who's on the move, which is somehow different from one whom you can set down and trust will be in relatively the same spot when you return from grabbing a glass of water. Sam is teaching one class in the mornings now, so he was gone from ten to noon, and when he got home, it was clear he was completely flattened by the chemicals they pumped him full of while in the hospital, so I sent him to bed. To bed until he woke up on his own.

On the move.

And the day yawned in front of me. And I grew anxious and lonely. What was I supposed to do? Nothing? Sit on the floor with her while she played? Strap her to me and do housework? Feedchangebathe her? Watch TV and eat cookies? Usually, I try to get out of the house. But it was raining pretty hard, so a walk wouldn't do it, and we were trying to get from Thursday to payday without spending any more money, and I didn't trust myself to walk the mall without spending a dime. Plus, I thought I should be able to handle it. I mean, what would be so hard about it?

I ended up holding her with one arm to my hip, and hauling out a mountain of laundry with the other arm, dumping the laundry in the middle of the living room, and perching her atop it. I felt quite clever for thinking of this. I turned on an audiobook, and handed her a brightly-colored sock whenever she fussed or her attention strayed to the fireplace or the room with the cat litter in it. This worked, more or less. It took an hour. And part of me thought, "Wow, that took an hour?!"And the other part of me thought, "That, only took an hour?!" There were so many hours to go.

On the laundry.

And the mean voice started in on me. "You should be loving this," the voice said. "What kind of a mother/woman/human are you that you don't love this? You know, Sam's better at taking care of her anyway. When she's with him, she chatters constantly. How come she's not talking to you? You must not talk to her enough. Think on this: If you were a good mom, what would you be doing right now? If you were a good mom, you would not be watching the clock, waiting for her nap, feeling exactly the way you felt at your first job at the taco shop, waiting for your shift to end. If you were a good mom, you'd probably be singing to her. You'd probably be giving her a bath, letting her splash and flap her hands.You'd probably have figured out some miniature craft appropriate for seven-month-olds, and the two of you would be doing it at the kitchen table, sunlight streaming through your cafe curtains. You don't even have cafe curtains."

I realized that we have next to zero support system around here. We have friends, but they're near the city, an hour or so away. And I have a few friends at church, but they have their hands full. In a week like this, when you begin it with a 911 call, you really need someone to help. You need someone to take the baby for a few hours while you reassemble the world. I even called someone to ask for help--which, folks, is huge for the likes of me--but she wasn't home, and by the time she got back to me, the baby was napping and it didn't seem like it mattered much anymore.

Except that when she did nap, I hopped on my computer to get some work done, and the whole time I felt my heart beating fast, anxious and worried. I kept having to check myself, wondering what I was feeling frightened of. I realized I was frightened of the end of her nap. Sam was still sleeping. I didn't know how many hours I had left in me.

When she woke up, I fed her and changed her, then let her climb the stairs to our bedroom, and the two of us woke Sam up. I broke my word, but it was five o'clock, and he'd been sleeping for nearly five hours, and I justified it as worry that he wouldn't sleep tonight if he didn't get up for awhile. But that wasn't it. It was the hours. I didn't think I had any more.

When I got Sam up, the three of us stayed on the bed for awhile while Sam slowly returned to the land of wakefulness, and I tried not to complain about his nap. Complaining about a gift-nap is so uncharming.

Sam and I got to talking about the train whistle, and Sam went to get it. We had thought perhaps she was just overtired when we last tried it. But today, in full daylight, just after waking from her nap, Sam made it whistle and she burst into tears again. She trembled and climbed deeper into my lap. Sam put the train whistle away in a drawer and carried the baby downstairs. I went in the bathroom to put my hair up, to get it out of my face. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time.

Sam said, over dinner, that he felt like a bear who had been shot with a tranquilizer gun, slept for days, and woke up to find his paw had been amputated. So while he tried to help with our bedtime routine, he mostly sat in a chair, asking if she was ready for bed yet so he could sleep. I sent him off to sleep, and wrestled the baby for another two hours before she'd settle down. And while I wrestled, I thought about this blog post, which I had started, and I thought, no no, you're not supposed to be that honest. Don't finish it; don't post it; hit delete and go to bed. There's something wrong with you that you're afraid of a day at home with your baby. Talk to your therapist about it, not your blog. No one will relate. They'll have all sorts of advice you should have thought of already. You're too depressing, too sad. They'll say you're depressed. Maybe you are depressed.

(I went to bed without the last part of this post, and now it's 1 a.m. and I just spent an hour getting her back to sleep, and now I have it:)

This should be the part where I tell a sweet story about something special that happened that made it all worth it again. And I could tell it that way: After we pulled off her day clothes and before we put on her pajamas, I tickled the warm, soft skin of her baby torso and she giggled and I laughed. It was a lovely moment. But still, by the time I got her to sleep for the night, I rolled my shoulders and shook my arms like a fighter sent back to her corner of the ring. Leaving her room, the word in my head was "depleted." I felt depleted.

I'm not depressed. And I'm a pretty good mom. And she really is a pretty good baby. She didn't have any meltdowns and she napped beautifully. She's teething, but I know things could be so much more difficult, and that they will probably get more difficult. If anything, I'm still swimming in gratitude that my husband didn't die of a heart attack on Monday. Even imagining the magnitude of that grief mapped over a day like today is overwhelming. So we were an average mom and an average baby on a fairly average day, and this job is still the hardest job I've ever had by far. The day was lonely and long and difficult. And if I have anything to say to my younger, frightened self, it's that: this day was lonely and long and difficult. And maybe I'll get more help tomorrow, but even if I don't, I'm going to do it again.

Emergent Occasions

Last night, while I was cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, I came in the living room to see Sam dancing with Henrietta to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He was swinging her around and tossing her up in the air and she was squealing with joy. Sam was shirtless, and I tried to talk him into putting a shirt on so I could take video of it, but he declined, and so I just sat and watched them, laughing.

When I finished the kitchen and came upstairs, Sam was sitting on the floor of her bedroom, and he was worried. His throat was tight and his left arm was numb, which are alarming symptoms when you're a man who had a heart attack at thirty-five, which Sam happens to be. I changed the baby's diaper while we talked it over--it being whether or not to take him to the ER. We prayed about it, and I felt more worried than I had before we prayed, so I talked him into letting me call his cardiology office. The doctor on call said what we expected: don't take a chance; he needs to go in. But she said something I didn't expect: Call 911. Now. Sam handed the phone to me so she could insist. And when I told her we were a two-minute drive to the hospital and couldn't I just drive him, she said the situation could change in an instant and there would be absolutely nothing I could do for him if it did. I needed to get him help, fast. So I hung up with her, and called.

I don't think I've ever called 911 before, and I can't say it was any fun. I wanted to ask them to please spare us the lights and sirens, thinking about our neighbors parting their curtains to see who was being hauled off. But of course I didn't ask that, and they arrived. First a cop, then a fire truck, then the paramedics. Suddenly, our living room was full of them, these uniformed men wearing their serious faces and standing with their feet spread apart, wearing their big manly boots, asking both of us questions and writing down our answers on index cards and refusing to be direct about the results of the portable EKG. The emergency lights bounced off the walls and strobed our faces, and I stood off to the side, holding Henrietta, pushing puzzle pieces out of the way with my foot to give the men more room. Sam and I looked at each other, sort of rolling our eyes at the whole thing. We were sure it was nothing. We've done this before. This was a lot of fuss for nothing at all. And yet, in the back of my mind, I know someday it may not be for nothing at all. We act as if it's that time every time. We have no alternative.

They strapped him onto one of those special chairs and carried him down the front stairs, and I stood out on the porch with the baby, waiting until they had loaded him in before I put her in the car to follow. I wasn't scared. Not really, though I wondered if I should be. The baby's eyes were wide, watching the lights and the men, watching her dad. And Sam tried to wave at her and show her everything was fine. I could see neighbors standing in the street with arms folded. I wanted to go up and kick them, tell them to go inside, for heaven's sake.

She cried all the way to the hospital. It was well past her bedtime and it was not her normal routine. Not by a long shot.

We sat in the room with Sam for several hours. The baby bounced on my lap until she cried, and I fed her until she slept and then slipped her very gently into her stroller, and then I rested my head in my hands for awhile longer. Once it became clear everything was basically fine and they had decided to admit him so they could do a few more tests in the morning, I strolled the baby outside and took her back home. We did our routine of waking and feeding, like we do every night, but I was so exhausted that I couldn't remember it come morning, and by nine, when I still hadn't heard from Sam, I started to think really insane things. I had called the hospital, and they transferred me to the ER, and then hung up on me. This happened twice, and I started to think maybe he had died and they were too afraid to tell me, so they were just hanging up on me. I got ready quickly, got the baby ready, fed the cats, and rushed over.

And this is the tedium of hospitals, the absolute insanity of it, the time warp of that space: nothing more had happened. It had been nine hours since I'd been there, and they hadn't done more tests and didn't really know any more than when I left. And we pretty much stayed in that limbo for six more hours. I can only handle that sort of thing for so long, and in the afternoon I got grumpy. I was exhausted, deeply deeply exhausted by entertaining the baby in that tiny room, exhausted by going back and forth to the nurses, asking if there was any progress or news or another blanket. I could feel myself losing patience. I set the baby down on the floor and she crawled around and I tried not to think of the floor being dirty. Nearly everyone who passed stopped to say how lovely and charming she was, and I'm so grateful for those people, since I very badly needed to be reminded every few minutes that she was beautiful and charming and perfect. When she finally slept, I climbed up on Sam's bed with him and rested my head on his chest, and the two of us dozed, but I wished I had a giant stroller that someone could tuck me into.

Sam's nurse was very blond and very thin and she had the most marvelous Northern England accent, and I didn't understand, dozing on Sam's chest, why I was not her. She had made my baby giggle (something I had not done that day) and she had given my husband one of those wonderful warm blankets and a couple of painkillers for his headache, and I wanted so badly to be fired. To just have someone fire me, and take over the whole gig--to be nicer to the nurses than I was capable of being, and then go home and do my dishes and get my baby ready for bed and tuck my husband in with a cup of tea, or whatever you give someone who suddenly might and then probably will not die any minute.    

Finally, they let us go. It had been twenty hours. Sam was grateful for his freedom. Somehow, I made dinner. I do not know how this happened, but it did. And then, after dinner, I sat on my couch again. Sam turned on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and danced with Henrietta, just as he had the night before, doctors and hospitals and heart trouble be damned. And I sat on the couch, smiling at him, taking the video below, feeling grateful, so grateful that he was okay and we were okay and we were done with the tedium and we were home. We were home. If you listen carefully, you can hear Henrietta squeal with joy.

Happy Mother's Day, Indeed.

When a woman delivered flowers Saturday afternoon--a giant yellow bouquet--and the card from Sam made me weepy, I thought, "Man, this Mother's Day thing is not bad at all." I know plenty of women who don't like this day much, or at least feel complicated about it (see this and this), and though I can understand this intellectually, for a moment, I didn't really get it.

But Sunday morning when Henrietta woke up at 4:30 and fussed her way to 6:30, I carried her into Sam and realized I understood at least part of the complication: was I supposed to be all mother-y because it was Mother's Day? Or was I supposed to pass her to Sam and get some sleep, since it was Mother's Day? Luckily, Sam agreed with the later, and I got a bit more sleep, but the whole day was kind of like that. I had a complicated day with Henrietta, while I think Sam had a pretty lovely day with her. In fact, the last thing she did before going to bed was climb all the way to the top of our stairs with Sam watching over her (13 stairs, plus a landing!). She got to the top and crawled into her room, and we clapped for her and marveled and it was very sweet. But I was off doing something with my Mother's Day freedom for most of it (spray-painting thrift store loot, if you must know), and so I sort of missed it. I don't know. It was a strange feeling all day.

Over the last week or so, she's become a completely different baby. She had those rough nights where she woke up every hour, sometimes twice an hour, and feeding her more only helped a bit. And then one day she stood up at the coffee table, just pulled herself right up and looked at Sam and grinned. On the same day, she suddenly crawled more efficiently that she ever had, and sat up more stably. It was a big day for her, after which she slept just fine, so I think she was up again and again trying to work out the logistics. She just turned seven months old, and I'll be shocked if it takes her until eight to walk. She's already taking steps around the coffee table.

So suddenly, my baby goes wherever she'd like. She's over here, stuffing an entire Target receipt in her mouth. She's over there, scratching the grate of the fireplace barrier. Church is suddenly sort of ridiculous, since she's not at all interested in sitting still with me. She's very busy. She has a full-time job.

Last Thursday she grabbed the cat's fur, and he turned around and scratched her face, and I watched her realize this creature she loved had hurt her, and it was crushing for both of us. We both sobbed.

Worse: yesterday, when she went to pet the cat again, and I went to stop her, I accidentally scratched her face somehow with my fingernail--scratched it deeper than the cat had. She was bleeding. And then she was crying this cry I had never heard before. I wanted to project all sorts of things into that cry--betrayal, confusion, like the central goodness of the world had turned on her. It was heartbreaking. Maybe the most heartbreaking moment yet. Happy Mother's Day, indeed.

All week, as I've worked to keep her safe and held her when she fell and tried to give her as much as I could that she seemed to want, I've thought, again and again (forgive me), "This s*** just got real." This is mothering on a different level. This is busy and scary and exhilarating. Part of me is longing for my newborn. When I see a newborn somewhere, it's difficult for me to believe that Henrietta isn't a newborn anymore. I look at her, and blink, wondering how it happened. But another part of me, of course, is thrilled with every day; it's just more complicatedly thrilling, if that makes sense--and probably deeper because of it, since everything is mixed together.

Back to her bedroom Sunday evening, after she'd crawled there herself from our downstairs living room. Sam took her pj's off, since they were making it hard for her to crawl, and she toured her room as if she'd never been there before, talking to us all the while. Sam sat on the floor with her, and I dug around in her closet, pulling out the next size of clothes to see if she'd fit them yet. I pulled out a yellow sunhat with bees on it, a hand-me-down from her cousin, and she crawled around in just that and a diaper. It was adorable, if I may say so. She clobbered a big teddybear she'd never noticed before. She pulled on a garland of stars I bought in Paris just after we married. She flashed her personality and her will around the room, and Sam and I were pleased with her, wondering how she'd be as she continued to grow up.  Sam said, "I like this. I like hanging out with you and with her." I agreed. As complicated as it's getting, she's beginning to feel more like my sidekick, my little friend. And the three of us are feeling more family-like. And I, I suppose, am the mother.