Terror, Baby
SIDS is ETA
A few days after we brought the baby home I woke to his lifeless body in my arms.
Or I thought I did. It was actually a wadded-up orange t-shirt I used to cover my eyes against the light, but, exhausted, I hallucinated the threadbare fabric into my son’s body, suffocated in bed as I had so feared would happen after the constant warnings about SIDS risks.
Not long after that, I woke up next to the actual baby after I had started nursing him in bed but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, what nursing involved, or who I was. I had been having a dream populated by a host of friends during a rare block of sleep and for a little while I was so groggy I didn’t immediately remember who my husband was, but I did ask him what I was supposed to do.
People will tell you how terrified they feel when they have a baby, how fragile newborns are, how vulnerable parenthood makes you. All that is true, but it is hard to understate how impossible everything feels and what nonsensical things you do when you do not sleep, the center of your body is broken, and you can more easily imagine a horrific compounding of already-losses than the ways in which this new person will become mundane to you, a given.
I think about some of the things we did the first three months and wonder how the baby made it that far. I wonder if we were being watched out for, if the benevolent giver, the enormous luck that made it possible for us to have him in our mid-40s, was also shielding him from my poorly calculated make-do. You couldn’t put him down in the crib, like, at all. If he was really tired he would stay there for half an hour. Still streaming blood and nursing my 6-pound baby while laying down for lack of the strength I needed to hold him up against me, I thought I might actually die if I couldn’t sleep for longer than that. Mostly, I was afraid I would lose consciousness and drop him while carrying him from one place to the other and I would feel sick anticipation that he would fall and his head would split on the floor. I always warn myself that it could happen when he is rolling around on the changing table or I am carrying him to bed, as if, by being vigilant against a very specific horrible thing, I can prevent it from happening.
So we reluctantly started co-sleeping in between taking shifts with him around the 2-3-hour intervals when he had to be breastfed at all hours. He had a sheetless pillowless area in the middle of the bed. I crouched my body around him in a C-shape so I would be less likely to roll over on him and to prevent my husband from rolling into his space. We put fat pool noodles under the sheet on each side of the bed as bumpers. I still knew it was hideously dangerous and what sleep I had was wary and fearful. But he was also the cuddliest co-napper and it was one of life’s best delights to sleep with him then, until he finally agreed to be placed in his crib for a little while at an almost exactly yet eternal three months, just like they tell you. A lot of having a baby involves apparently contradictory co-occurrences while people only tell you one side. Of course it wasn’t really possible to simply put the mattress on the floor, but probably those cultures where people mostly sit and eat and sleep closer to the ground were thinking about babies. Thinking of every possible bad outcome of stubbing my toe on furniture and falling in the dark while holding the baby or suddenly losing my grip or idk tripping on the cat is tiring but it has also possibly prevented terrible outcomes, so here we are, still doing it, a reflex of the terrible.
I should have remembered to be wary the evening I was carting some cookies to a friend’s house with the baby strapped to my chest, and, feeling late, I took a shortcut down a dark, wet leaf-slicked staircase. I slipped and fell and panicked before I even hit the ground that he was going to be hurt. I twisted to the side as hard as I could and landed on the edge of a stair, leading to a painful pulled muscle or something that lasted weeks but left the baby untouched and not even upset, really. My friend came out and found me on the wet staircase and helped me take the baby to the health center where the nurse thought I was being a bit much because clearly, the baby was fine. I was still hysterical because I hadn’t foreseen it, hadn’t worried enough. I realize there are medications for this type of thing and I would always support anyone who is going to take them but clearly as a breastfeeding mother I well, you can see where this is going. It’s not a great way to be and probably I should go back to therapy, or maybe at least to bed.
I could cite the three miscarriages and two failed IVF treatments I had before I had my son, including the time I returned from an egg retrieval to learn that my father had died and about how it became very clear that even when something happens only very rarely it could still be you it happens to. I could tell you I spent my fourth pregnancy checking my underwear for blood every time I went to the bathroom, of knowing more about the signs of preeclampsia than anyone in my prenatal class. But I still went to the swimming pool on the day I went into labor because I didn’t know what it was, I just thought I was really constipated. By exhausting myself with hypotheticals I don’t have energy to address the real risks as I walk into them. But at some point everything bad that has happened will be past, the anguish become action. I need to believe that.
