The Queen of Hearts(66)

What would Graham have thought of me as a mother if he’d lived?

The reality of motherhood had been a huge shock to me. I got pregnant almost as soon as Wyatt and I were married. Someone told me about a popular advice book for the parents of infants, which advocated tidy blocks of scheduled sleeping and feeding. This appealed to me immediately. Despite the chaos of my profession, I love schedules, love order and predictability, and have an inverse dislike of entropy. My baby, I felt sure, would thrive with a set routine. Naturally, I would have to be somewhat flexible; sometimes there would be small shifts in the feeding start time, or naps, or cuddle time, or whatever, because babies are . . . babies. I would adjust.

Yet right from the moment of his birth, Henry was hell-bent on avoiding a schedule. Under his thatch of wispy hair, his tiny face was permanently red from the strain of yelling so much. He did not sleep more than an hour at a time, and he seemed angry every time he nursed, as if he were being simultaneously starved and choked. This dragged out the process of feeding him because as soon as he finished, it was time to feed him again.

If you’d asked me before Henry was born, I’d have sworn I’d be the last person on earth ever to allow a child to sleep in my bed. Cosleeping was a good example of the mushy, lenient, laissez-faire-type parenting springing up among a certain subset of Gen X parents, the kind who didn’t believe in negative reinforcement and stopped breastfeeding only when their kids were old enough to drive. You’d think most of these people would be kind of crunchy, but attachment parenting has infiltrated all ideologies: conservative, liberal, hippies, tea-partiers, everybody.

Everyone said the first three months would be rough. In fact, they were brutal beyond anything I had imagined. It was worse than my residency. I became a drooling, irritable zombie with zero regard for hygiene. In desperation, I read all the baby sleep books: Secrets of the Baby Whisperer; The Girlfriends’ Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood; What to Expect the First Year; Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. They didn’t help. Henry was completely resistant to sleep.

At four months, the pediatrician gave me the okay to let Henry “cry it out.” I was warned it would be heartrending, that I should resist the urge to rush in and comfort him, in the interest of teaching him he could, in fact, fall asleep on his own. It might take a half hour or more, but no baby can cry forever. Right?

Henry didn’t get the memo. He bellowed in outrage for five solid hours before he succumbed for forty-five minutes. Then he woke up and commenced his usual roaring. Wyatt resisted the urge to comfort Henry during the marathon screaming session, but only because he comforted himself by downing a bottle of Maker’s Mark while staring in horror at the blaring red lights on the baby monitor.

“The hell with this, muffin,” he said finally. “Can we see if he’ll sleep in our bed?”

Babies are helpless but brilliant parasites who have survived the millennia by enslaving adults. They accomplish this by (a) making people think they’re cute and (b) producing a noxious noise until you do their bidding. Henry was excellent at both. He didn’t sleep long stretches in our bed either, but any attempt to remove him resulted in torrential screeching. If allowed to remain, he would drift off more pleasantly and could be silenced upon reawakening by nursing, all without anyone having to pace the floor.

Now that Henry was nearly three, he was finally weaned. I had taken to breastfeeding with less-than-total enthusiasm, unable to shake an unpleasant bovine sensation. Everybody breastfed, though. It was better for babies, and people who didn’t want to do it were regarded with politely masked disdain. It was not even enough just to do it. You were supposed to love it. Most mothers—like Zadie, for example—waxed poetic about the bonding, the sweetness, the comfort of holding a milk-scented lump of warmth, the flood of endorphins when a baby locked its little gaze on theirs. I mainly felt a raging impatience as I was trapped in a chair, and frustration with Henry, who cried so much he would intermittently stop drinking in order to look up and holler at me. I knew better than to bring this up with Zadie, though. Every time Zadie held a baby, her own or not, she began to emit authentic waves of maternal warmth and love.

But I kept on breastfeeding at night, even after I went back to work, because at least that way we all got a little sleep. On the nights I was at the hospital, Wyatt had to resort to pacifiers and bottles, which Henry would tolerate only in my absence.

He was finally cut off now, though. That was a tremendous ordeal, but nothing compared to our attempts to get him into his own bed. He systemically destroyed us every time we tried. It was genius, really. He’d even managed to ensure there was no sibling competition for his parents’ affection, since our sex life was decimated.

Thank goodness his personality improved. He was not very verbal, but he was clearly smart; he could efficiently disassemble any electronic device to its component parts in less than three minutes, and he had learned how to operate the complicated TV remote without instruction. And now that he’d escaped whatever demons had possessed his baby phase, he was fun. He adored Wyatt and erupted into helpless, snorty giggles whenever they played. With me, he was calmer; he loved burrowing into my lap and rubbing his soft little cheeks against me. And now I felt it: the helpless, searing wash of love for my baby that meant I’d do anything for him. I was relieved to finally have the sense that I must have been a normal mother.

I turned up the sidewalk in front of our huge house, surveying its gables and its beautiful old slate roof. Following a pebbled path along the side of the house, I arrived at the back door, calling “I’m back!” as I tucked my running shoes away in their cubby. From overhead a pattering sound struck my ears, which gave way to the steady thump of small feet on the stairs. Henry came into view, making the excited grunting sounds he always reserved for welcoming me home. I knelt down and opened my arms, and he careened into me, his solid little body wriggling with wordless joy.