We Are Pleased to Announce

. . . that to celebrate her 13-month birthday, Allison Clare resumed a long-forgotten tradition of sleeping through the night.

Two weeks ago, at her one-year pediatrician's appointment, we got the all-clear to drop her night feedings. Her small size (10-15 percentile) had gotten her an extended grace period on those, but by now, all of us--AC, Sam, me, and even the cat I think--were ready to drop the night feedings. We went to CT for a few days right after the appointment, and then she got sick, postponing things by a bit. I was glad I was still nursing her at that point since she had lost interest in food and drink, so at least this way she was getting some fluids. But still, I was biding my time.

Then this past Friday night, she woke up twice in quick succession, and the second time, nursing wasn't really an option. She screamed for an hour and twenty minutes. Seriously: standing in her crib in the 3 a.m. dark, screaming at the top of her lungs in total, frantic, bloodcurdling rage. Nothing consoled her, but she finally wore herself out and surrendered to sleep. Saturday night, she woke up twice, screamed for 40 minutes the first time, and just cried for 5 minutes the next time. And last night, she slept through, crying a couple of times in her sleep but basically going all the way through to 7:45 a.m.

Weirdly, I slept worse last night than ever in a long time--I was totally wired. I had noticed that nursing her at night gave me a sudden feeling of drowsiness (oxytocin, I guess?), so it's been nice to have a little natural sleep aid . . . but I'll definitely take the trade-off in unbroken hours.

March Madness

No, not the basketball tournament--just our regular routine, plus a couple of variations. Sam is interviewing candidates for a position in his department all week, so we've shuffled our child-care relay a bit and I'm home with AC more. Which I love, but which also means less time to get work finished during a week of midterms and essays to grade, my honors student's thesis to read and comment on (twice), three extra meetings, an evening reading, and different babysitting schedules to coordinate, etc. Eek.

Still, our biggest concern this week has been that Allison Clare has been sick with her first real illness since she was first born. She woke up at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday morning with a fever that at one point read 105. That night I'd intended to drop her night feedings once and for all, but when she woke up and I went in and touched her in her crib, she practically sizzled, and when I read the thermometer, I had her feeding again within seconds in an effort to get fluids into her. (Was this her revenge? Perhaps . . .) Saturday, she was tired and not playful, almost like a sad little ragdoll, burrowing her head into my neck and whimpering if I tried to put her down. But by the next day, she was feeling much better, and by Monday, her fever was gone. Still, she seems to have a bit of a cough today--not sure if it's related, but a teaspoon of honey appears to be helping with it.

Honey, unfortunately, has done little to combat the effects of sleeping only a couple of hours on my part, between staying up until 12:30 to grade and getting up at 4 a.m. with AC (and fitting in a feeding in between). Still, I feel strangely cheerful . . . it's somehow nice to get things done, even too many things.

Dateline: New Haven

I'm posting this from New Haven, where AC and I are visiting the home of the Two Js (one J present) and inspecting baby Sinjin. For me, this has involved cuddling him and kissing his plump little cheeks, while for AC it has involved more foot-pulling and an attempted pacifier sharing program. They seem to like each other--at one point, Sinjin leaned toward AC and said "aaaghh"; she turned to him, and they smiled at each other. All together now: Awwww.

Upstanding Citizen

A few short weeks ago, Allison Clare was still pretty content to sit in one place, play with whatever was in reach, and maybe scootch around a little on her bottom.  One of our babysitters sent us a sweet note at Christmas and said something intended to be encouraging, like "I really think that crawling can't be far away!"  But we weren't worried; AC loved standing and practicing her little squats holding onto the footboard of our bed for long periods of time, and we figured she'd move on from there in her own time.

I should have known that her time would be very slow and then all at once--it's the way my labor went at her birth (barely perceptible for a week, and then she was born in about 2 1/2 hours), and actually, the way she and her daddy came into my life: no warning, then suddenly, they were both there, taking up residence at the center of my universe . . .

So, anyway, about a week or two before her birthday, she started doing that baby army crawl on her belly.  Within a few days, she was up on all fours and moving at full speed; she'd realized the possibilities pretty quickly and was visibly elated when she first crawled out of her bedroom on her own and came looking for me, where I was watching her from across the hall.  

And now she's pulling up on everything that will hold her and cruising around the room, from coffee table to sofa to worktable to loveseat to steps, heaven help us.  She lives a vertical life now.  

Humane Society

The other day, Holly strolled over to lie down by Allison Clare in a gesture of what I think of as marvelous tolerance on the cat's part; even under our watchful eyes, AC's love pats often turn into gleeful slaps, vigorous pinches, and in-kitty's-face screeches without so much as a warning.   And in fact, Allison Clare lightly pet the cat as we've taught her, but quick-as-a-heartbeat reached over to wrench Holly closer by twisting that tender part of the cat's inner haunch where the hip connects to the body.  

My poor, gentle cat looked startled and frantic, and for one alarmed millisecond, neither the cat nor I knew exactly what was going to happen.  I saw her paw shoot out for a second--near Allison Clare's precious cheek--and then Holly had writhed away.  

And then my inspection confirmed that that sweet cat had not even put out her claws in her effort to push away and escape, as if behind her frantic eyes, her little kitty brain had been thinking "How do I get myself away without hurting the baby?"

It Changes Everything, 2

Kate responded to my last post by saying something about herself that is also true for me: that her love for her daughters is the most (the only?) unconditional love she's ever known. Her comment made me think more about what I had written, because for certain my love of Allison Clare is unconditional, and I've been thinking about whether my love for anyone else is unconditional as well.  

I might say that my love for my parents is unconditional, but I'm not sure that counts--I'm not sure I'd have loved them the same way if they'd been abusive or crazy my whole life, instead of endlessly supportive and loving, so perhaps my "unconditional" love is really just that I'm so deeply indebted.  Likewise with my sister: growing up with someone, sharing the same family and points of reference and sense of humor (though she's much funnier) has created a bond that has shaped my world so wholly that I can't imagine not having it, much less think of rejecting it on the basis of some kind of misdeed or offense.  My love for them is unconditional because it would be unimaginable not to exist within it.

Maybe my love for JS is the most unconditional because we've kind of grown up together, and we've both commented many times on the uniqueness of the bonds you make at the age we met (in college).  Case in point: when I visit JS or she visits me and our husbands are not around, we often climb into each other's beds to sit around and chat.  It seems totally normal to us because we went to college together and inhabited dorm rooms where the bed was virtually the only furniture.  But it would be totally weird if I climbed into the bed of one of my work friends, no matter how close we seem to be.  Both JS and I are too busy, too lazy, and too old at this point to put in the time to recreate such a bond with another person, so our love is unconditional by default.

And my love for Sam, oddly enough, is perhaps the most conditional of all.  Not in the sense that there are conditions going forward, but that our love is a product of certain conditions: the values that brought us together, our respect and affection for each other, and our shared commitment to the life we are building together.

Which brings me back to my love for Allison Clare.  It's true, what Kate said: it's unconditional in that I could never stop loving her.  And I would change any condition in my life to allow for my love of her; apart from the constraints of being obedient to God, I would do anything for her, without thinking twice about it.  In that sense, my love for her is indeed different from my love of others.

But what I've realized about that unconditional love is that in part, it's unconditional because it's so very self-centered.  My love for her is such a part of me that loving her is inseparable from loving myself.  In that sense, I feel somewhat different from parents who say that their love for their children has made them more unselfish, more giving.  I think that my love for Allison Clare has made me less selfish only to the extent that I give more to her; it has made me more selfish in that I would give the world to protect her, my child.

God's love, I think, is somehow able to inhabit both of these forms; it's specific and universal at the same time.  The parable tells us that he leaves the 99 sheep to go after the one that is lost, and yet he loves all 100 the same; he counts them all.  It's this paradox, this mystery, that I can't contain within myself; I prefer Allison Clare.  Not to prefer her would be a sin, I think, a kind of crime against nature; and yet, to prefer her to the detriment of others is its own failing as well in that I think the largest spirits are those who can love everyone as much as their own children: Mother Theresa, Harry Holt (who founded my adoption agency) . . .  

This is the paradox that made Melville mad, the thing that his erstwhile friend Hawthorne meant when he said that Melville "could neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief," that he was too honest to pretend to anything other than the uncertainty wrought by two equal, irreconcilable truths.  All of this may be why my favorite of the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick is the one where Melville wonders if the positions of the whale's eyes, on either side of its head, mean that its brain is capable of processing two separate images, two distinct realities, whereas ours can only hold a single one at once.  I've written about this before; I'm about to start teaching the book again, so my favorite parts are on my mind I guess. 

It Changes Everything

. . . that is what everyone tells you about having a baby, and I've always found it to be kind of an eye-roller.  I mean, lots of things in my life have "changed everything." Reading East of Eden in the tenth grade.  Traveling to Europe more or less on my own as a sixteen-year-old.  Driving my car, loaded, out to St. Louis and coming around the I-70 over the Mississippi to see the arch lit up almost green against the night sky, strange and startling as a lunar landscape.  Someone turning to me at a party on a drizzly, humid fall evening and introducing himself as Sam.  

 

I've always been equally reluctant to abide the chirpily expressed sentiment that you don't really know love until you have a child.  My love for Allison Clare is unlike my love for anyone else in the world, and yet my love for Sam is also unique, as is my love for my parents and my sister and JS and AC's namesake and my dear grandmother.  So, yes, having Allison Clare is one of the many things that have changed everything, and I love her differently from anyone else in my world.

And yet/And so, I think one of the things this past year has taught me is not that these statements are untrue as much as why they are so prevalent, what it is about the bond we share with our children that makes us want to pronounce that love in terms that almost reduce the significance and complexity and respect that we are able to acknowledge in and offer to every other relationship in our lives.  

I can so easily imagine myself being consumed by my love for Allison Clare.  When she was first born, the very constancy of her demands on me--my attention, my body, my emotions, my creativity, my time--lent itself to that kind of intensity.  And as her personality has grown out of its baby-softness, my love for her has also grown more specific; "she's this kind of baby, and not that kind"--therefore, I prefer this kind. 

But here's the thing: my love for Allison Clare is, I realize, a selfish love.  As much as it demands unselfish actions every hour of every day, and as much as it may require me to abandon selfish pursuits and put her needs first, doing things for her is inseparable from doing things for myself.  It would hurt me to see her hurt or in need, and perhaps it's avoiding my own discomfort that makes me want to do things for her.  I think this may be what makes some parents crazily stifling or controlling.  Allison Clare is her own person, and she has been since before she was born; I love her as myself, which is a kind of selfishness that can only be undone, one day, by the sacrifice of myself to her freedom.