Before I Sleep

My son - the second one, the living one - slept in our room from the start. It's not as though we had a choice. I was breastfeeding exclusively, and because (as we later discovered) I couldn't produce enough to meet his needs, his wake/eat/sleep/wake again cycle started again every 60 minutes (occasionally we were lucky enough to stretch the cycle to 90 minutes); we were all so sleep-deprived for the first month that we couldn't afford to expend the energy to go downstairs to retrieve him 24 times per day. But even after we began to supplement, and the boy began to sleep five, then six, then eight to nine hours per night, we kept him in the bassinet of his play yard, next to my side of the bed.

We made excuses. He's too little compared to his crib downstairs and will feel cozier in the smaller bassinet. Spontaneously sleeping so many hours at a time might indicate a problem, so we need to keep him close to keep an eye on him. It's more environmentally responsible to keep him in our room so we only have to run one air conditioner. It's just for the first three months, "the fourth trimester," and then we'll move him downstairs. And so forth.

Before he turned three months old, my mother moved in with us, which settled the question for the next six months; we moved his crib into our room to make room for her and patted ourselves on the back for helping him grow up by getting used to his "big boy bed."

While we were on our month-long trip up the Pacific Coast Highway, he slept in the room with us out of necessity, in a studio apartment on Venice Beach, in friends' spare bedrooms in the East Bay and the Willamette Valley, and in a succession of hotel rooms. In some of those hotel rooms, he actually slept with us in our bed because no portacribs were available. It worked out just fine, for all of us.

When we returned home, my mom was in the process of moving into her newly-purchased home. We couldn't move our son into his room immediately because some of her things were still in the room. Unthinkable that he might sleep in a less-than-pristine room!

The following week, my mom, my son and I flew to my grandparents' little town for Mother's Day. We stayed with an aunt and uncle, and while my mom stayed down the hall from them, the boy and I bunked in the basement (nicely finished, our own bathroom and TV, and a private, walk-out patio) so as not to wake any of them unnecessarily. He slept in a play yard next to my sofa bed, and when he woke for his usual 6:30 am nursing session, I pulled him into bed with me so we could go back to sleep together until 8:30 or so.

We got back last week, and while we were gone, my husband had rearranged our bedroom and moved the crib back downstairs before leaving on a trip of his own. We had planned and agreed on these changes in advance. But it was just the two of us, and who wants to sleep alone? So for the first three nights, I had the play yard set up in our bedroom. The first night my husband was back, we all wanted to be together, of course.

It's too hot in our bedroom now, so we've finally started putting him in his crib, in his own room. Tonight is the third such night. He's made the switch easily. All of our concerns about his ability to sleep alone were completely unfounded.

Which reveals the embarrassing truth: I am the big baby here. I am the one not ready for him to sleep in another room. I cannot sleep if he isn't near me. The thought of him waking and crying and neither of us hearing him is unbearable.

The thought of him dying alone - that's the real kicker. That's the thought that's really lurking there in the background. If I am not there to monitor the signs of distress, oh my god, what might happen? I have a history of our babies dying on my watch, you see, so I'm under a bit of pressure to rehabilitate my reputation. I'm okay with the watcher being someone else, depending on the person. My husband qualifies, as do the boy's grandmothers and great-grandmother, some aunts. The only other person here at night, though, is the husband, and he's had to get up and go to work, so at night it's been up to me. I've slept the last two nights in the boy's room, and I'm stalling now, as though I'm trying to decide whether to go up or stay down, but it's a ruse: I am sooo sleeping in his room tonight. I am not ready for him to sleep alone.

My husband, god bless him, didn't flinch when I confessed this fact to him tonight; he actually agreed to switch places with me Monday night since he doesn't work the next day and I have an important exam that morning. We can't keep it up forever, though. At some point, my son will not want me in the room, either. I wonder when that moment will be. Probably before his first sleepover, I would imagine. Damn, it will break my heart.