All of a sudden I realized I was starving. Perry ran down to the hospital food court and brought me a new McDonald’s invention called the McGriddle. It was essentially eggs and sausage between two pancakes that had been infused with artificial maple syrup flavoring, and it was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted in my life. I felt like I could conquer the world as long as I had McGriddles and my family by my side. And also my sweet recovery nurse, who had introduced me to the wonders of ice packs that fit neatly inside mesh grandma underwear that the hospital supplied in abundance for only ninety-eight dollars a pair, according to our final bill. I believe I was on what some may call a labor-and-delivery high.
The next two days were a blur of friends and family coming by the hospital to visit and Perry watching a NASCAR race while he held his new daughter because “train up a child in her redneck ways, and when she is old she will not depart from them.” We passed Caroline around and I turned her into my own personal baby doll, changing her clothes every chance I got, because a girl needs to appreciate a good wardrobe as much as she needs to appreciate Dale Earnhardt Jr. winning Talladega.
On our last night in the hospital things were quiet. All the visitors had left, and I told Perry he should go home and get some sleep in a real bed. The nurse brought Caroline to me for one last late-night feeding. I took in every single inch of her while she nursed, still in a bit of disbelief that she was really mine and that they were really going to let me walk out of the hospital with her the next day.
After she was passed out in a milk stupor, I unwrapped her so I could take in those little fingers and toes. I took off her hat so I could see her thick black hair. And I wept. I wept because she was so beautiful. I wept because she felt like redemption for so many mistakes I’d made. I wept because how do you thank God for such an indescribable gift?
Lord, let me be worthy of this.
Lord, don’t let me screw this up.
Perry arrived at the hospital bright and early the next morning. We did our best version of waiting patiently for all the necessary discharge forms to get filled out and listened to a long lecture about car seat safety. Clearly they didn’t know they were talking to the chief of the Safety Police. Perry had already put those plastic childproof plugs in every outlet of our house even though I assured him it would be months before our little girl would do much more than look cute.
Eventually they brought our baby to us, and the pediatric nurse hugged us good-bye as she said, “Y’all are so lucky. She is one of the most laid-back babies I have ever seen.” I nodded my head in agreement as I chalked up that trait to my already stellar parenting. Obviously Caroline’s laid-back nature was a tribute to the forty-eight hours I’d spent performing my mothering skills with excellence. This was going to be so easy.
So with all the confidence of two fools who don’t know any better, Perry and I loaded Caroline into the car. And, yes, I rode in the backseat with her, because what if something happened on the ten-minute car ride home? Two days in, and I was already one of those helicopter parents you read about.
As Perry chauffeured us home, I realized that life had already changed so much. We were a family of three now. Three. Which is significantly more than two.
Especially when one of you doesn’t know how to microwave her own dinner.
Chapter 8
That Time I Didn’t Sleep for Four Years
When I was little I wasn’t the best sleeper. I can’t remember all the reasons why, but I’d like to go back and tell that little girl to go to bed and enjoy it while it lasts. I suppose I was afraid of the dark, I needed a drink of water, I had to go to the bathroom. I would push the limits of bedtime until my parents were forced to start following through on their threats. Which was usually my indicator that it was time to shut it down for the night.
But then I turned into a teenager and learned to appreciate the value of a good night’s sleep. It became an art form as I looked for new and improved ways to make my bed even more comfortable, as evidenced by the fact I slept on top of my bed inside a fleece-lined Garfield sleeping bag for most of my high school years.
Then in college I discovered the beauty of scheduling all my classes for late in the day, thereby creating a twofold brand of awesome: sleeping late and having plenty of time to watch Days of Our Lives before I had to be bothered with the foolishness of geology lab. Because how was I supposed to get excited over a bunch of rock formations if I didn’t know whether Bo and Hope escaped from the remote island where they were being held hostage by Stefano DiMera?
(On a totally similar subject, Gulley does the best impersonation ever of Tony DiMera. She can still crack me up to this day by walking into a room and saying, “Hello, Father,” in a distinctly bad British accent.)
(This is the kind of thing we worked on during college along with planning the perfect outfit instead of actually studying and probably explains why I graduated on academic probation.)
My love for sleep took a hit after I married Perry. He is a believer in the theory that sleep is just something you do to have enough energy for the next day. That belief, combined with his insistence on keeping the same hours as Grandpa Walton, put a serious damper on my sleep schedule. I’d stay up late, per my night-owl tendencies, and then he’d wake me up at the crack of dawn, wanting to engage in real conversations with actual words and eat a meal that people apparently call breakfast. I played along for about the first six months because I didn’t want to appear lazy. But then the newness wore off and I couldn’t fake it anymore. We had to have an honest discussion about how I really never cared to see the sun rise or talk before 9:00 a.m. And those things you call eggs? No, thank you.
The low point came one day about four years into our marriage when we were having the exterior of the house painted. It was—don’t judge me—probably about ten o’clock in the morning, and the painter needed an outlet to plug in a sander or something. I’m not totally sure because I don’t paint houses for a living. Anyway, he noticed our bedroom window was cracked open, so he took the liberty of opening it a little bit wider to access an electrical outlet. However, he couldn’t reach it because the bed was too close to the wall. So he began to move our bed while I was in it to get it out of the way. And I was so embarrassed about still being in bed at ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning that I just buried myself under the covers and hoped he wouldn’t notice me lying there in my slothful state.
This incident didn’t cause me to change my ways. It just made me double-check that our windows were shut before we went to bed at night. And I feel I should clarify that I was gainfully employed during this time, but I had the great fortune of working in pharmaceutical sales, so I justified my hours with the rationalization that I was doing the doctors a favor by not showing up at their offices before eleven o’clock. This gave them time to see their patients, and it gave me time to let the two deep sleep creases on my forehead go away.
(If any of my former managers are reading this, I apologize profusely. I was young and stupid, and you probably shouldn’t have hired me in the first place. But I tricked you by appearing to be excited and motivated by success.)
(I was smart enough not to mention in interviews that a huge perk of the job for me was not having to be any certain place at any certain time. That’s not the kind of thing that gets your foot in the door.)
Anyway, the point is I love sleep. I love sleep like some people love ham sandwiches. I can taste it. If I wake up after a particularly good night’s sleep, I’ll spend that entire day looking forward to the moment I can get back in bed and do it all over again. There were so many times during my pregnancy when I would remark, “It’s just so hard to get comfortable at night. I’ll be glad when she’s born so I can get some sleep.” And all the mothers in the room would look at me with blank expressions and nod their heads, but I know now they were silently thinking, Get ready, sister, because that baby is coming, and sleep is about to be relegated to the category of “things that are in your past.�
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It was a Tuesday morning when we walked into our house with Caroline for the first time. Appropriately enough, Guy the electrician and Paul the plumber were still there, finishing up a few last construction details, like installing our real kitchen sink. So I recruited Guy to come into the front yard and take a picture of Perry, Caroline, and me in front of the giant stork holding pink balloons and announcing Caroline’s arrival.
(I feel like I should clarify it wasn’t a real stork. Although that would have been awesome.)
(But I think you have to go to the zoo or Vienna to find a real stork. The only thing I’ve ever had from Vienna is their little sausages.)
For the first few hours of our arrival home, the house was abuzz with plumbers plumbing and electricians electricing and ten lords a-leaping. Friends brought over food and flowers, neighbors stopped by to see the new baby, and my mother-in-law continued to organize the kitchen that we’d left in disarray three days earlier. Meanwhile, Caroline was content to be passed around from person to person in between sunbathing in her bassinet to help with her mild case of jaundice.
Then evening came, and everyone went home. The house felt eerily quiet. Perry and I decided to eat the roast Gulley and her mom had brought by earlier, so we heated up two plates, rolled Caroline in her bassinet right up to the table, and sat down to eat. Perry blessed our food and gave a prayer of thanks for our little family of three. And then, just as we began to eat, “You Are So Good to Me” began to play on the stereo.
We both sat quietly, listening to the music and eating our roast until the song got to the chorus:
You are beautiful my sweet, sweet song
You are beautiful my sweet, sweet song
You are beautiful my sweet, sweet song
I will sing again
We took a quick glance at each other and began to cry. Both of us. Not just me. Right there in our dining room, we were overwhelmed by love and grace. Overwhelmed by this sweet, sweet song who lay sleeping quietly next to us, all wrapped in pink and sucking on a pacifier that was bigger than her face. It was as if God had just walked over to the table and sat down. It was a holy moment. A holy moment with a mixture of a lot of awe and more than a little fear about what we were supposed to do next.
Since Perry loves few things more than a good strategy, he came up with a plan of attack for the night shift. “Grandpa Walton” would go to bed early while I’d keep my usual night-owl hours and give Caroline her last late-night feeding around 1:00 a.m. The problem with having a baby who weighed only five and a half pounds was that the pediatrician insisted she needed to be fed every three hours without fail for the first six weeks of her life. Which translates to having to wake a sleeping baby. In the middle of the night.
Word to the wise: have a big baby. It’s totally the way to go. I knew I should have eaten more donuts.
After her 1:00 a.m. feeding, I’d go to sleep and set the alarm for 4:00 a.m., at which time Perry would come in to give her a bottle while I used the dreaded breast pump and went back to sleep until 7:00 a.m. There really is nothing that will put the spark back in your marriage like having your husband see the sleep-deprived, hormonal version of you bent over a mechanical breast pump machine at four in the morning. Possibly while crying.
In theory this system worked fairly well, but we’d forgotten the whole unpredictable newborn-baby component. We assumed she’d just eat and go back to sleep. Instead, she felt nighttime was the time to party and get out all the gas she’d held in all day long. So my precious 1:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. sleep window translated to a forty-five-minute catnap after factoring in the time I spent changing her diaper and pumping her little legs like she was riding a bike to get rid of her gas and then changing her diaper again and then swaddling her and rocking her back to sleep. Not to mention all the times she’d fall asleep while eating, which may have caused me to actually utter, “If I can’t sleep, then neither can you, sister.” Honestly, just talking about the whole thing right now is causing me to have post-traumatic stress symptoms. Is it hot in here?
One night, at about the two-week mark, I was rocking Caroline at two thirty in the morning and I just began to cry because I was so homesick for the hospital. It was so lovely there, what with all the nurses and staff who would take my baby for a few hours so I could get actual REM sleep. I wanted to go back to that world of pampering and mesh underwear and pain medication doled out on a regular basis.
And maybe it was a combination of the sleep deprivation and the hormones, but I was so sensitive to every little thing. Gulley told me she survived late-night feedings with Jackson by watching movies on the DVD player, but I quickly discovered I couldn’t handle the stimulation. The only thing I could bear to watch was Little Women (the Winona Ryder version—I think it’s the best) and VH1’s I Love the Seventies. There was a time I was certain Caroline’s first words would be “What’s goin’ down, Mr. Kotter?”
Part of our nighttime strategy was that whoever was on baby duty would sleep in the guest bedroom with Caroline in her bassinet right beside the bed. This would allow the off-duty parent to get maximum sleep benefits in the comfortable, dark master bedroom. There were many nights I sat in that guest bed holding Caroline and concocting a plan to run away to the nearest Westin for just a few days. Why the Westin? Because I knew they had those heavenly beds. That’s all I wanted in life. A heavenly bed in a quiet, baby-free hotel room. Surely Perry would understand if I just packed my bags and left for a few days?
But then Caroline would open her little mouth wide in a yawn or do that newborn stretch thing where her entire back arched backward and her arms lifted above her head, and I was brought back to the world where I was someone’s mother. Yes, I wanted sleep, but I’d already started to dread the day she’d start kindergarten, because I knew it would be here before I knew it. And I couldn’t even talk about what I was going to do when my maternity leave was over and I had to go back to work. So I’d rock Caroline to sleep while I prayed that kindergarten wouldn’t arrive too quickly and that she’d have friends and that I’d get some sleep and that we’d win the lottery so I wouldn’t have to go back to schlepping around drug samples to doctor’s offices.
I couldn’t imagine missing one moment of this little girl’s life.
Chapter 9
War Buddies
Thanks to my almost sleepless nights, I walked around like a zombie for most of the days. The only thing that saved me was my sister, Amy, and her love for her new niece. Amy didn’t have kids of her own yet, so it was a complete novelty to her to come over and rock Caroline for a few hours while I showered and put on the cleanest pair of pajamas I could find from the bottom of the laundry hamper. Makeup and jewelry became a distant memory. I was dressing for survival and selecting garments that could take me from awake to nap in sixty seconds.
I began to dread the evenings because I was so tired and all I wanted to do was crawl in bed and sleep for, oh, I don’t know, maybe more than two hours in a row. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen, and I’d start to fall into a deep depression right after dinnertime as I thought about all the sleep I wasn’t going to get that night. It didn’t help that Caroline had suddenly come alive on us and was ready to fight for her right to party.
I would hang over the edge of her bassinet, patting her back and making deals with God about all the humanitarian deeds I would do if only he would make her go to sleep. “You can do it, Lord. I know you can do it. You can move mountains.” I developed the ability to sleep while holding my hand over the edge of her bassinet to keep her pacifier in place because if the pacifier went down, that ship was sunk. These were desperate times.
Then there was the night I emerged from Caroline’s nursery to find Perry watching Tears of the Sun, the most violent, horrific movie ever made. It pushed me over the edge. I can’t imagine why I didn’t find a movie about the slaughter of Nigerian refugees uplifting in my time of sleep need, but it launched me into a tirade of tears. “I can’t do this,” I wai
led. “I am just so tired. And I want to run away to the Westin on the Riverwalk.”
I think Perry was a little stunned that I’d developed a fairly specific escape plan, and he agreed to take the entire night shift so I could get some real sleep. Or at least so I could sleep until I had to wake up and use the dreaded breast pump so nothing exploded. And as it turned out, that was exactly what I needed—just a few continuous hours of sleep that didn’t involve keeping someone’s pacifier in her mouth or listening to her let loose with an explosion in her diaper while I debated on a scale of one to ten how bad a mother had to be to let her baby continue to sleep in her own poop.
The next day I talked to my friend Jamie on the phone. Jamie has two boys who are exactly 364 days apart. (It’s safe to say that wasn’t planned.) She listened to me cry over my loss of sleep and the death of a lifestyle that now seemed so easy and carefree. And she spoke some words of wisdom that totally changed everything for me. “I know you can’t believe it right now,” she said, “but a day will come when you will put her in bed at eight o’clock at night and you won’t hear a peep out of her for almost twelve hours.”
That simple statement filled me with hope for the future. Of course, eight years later I’m still waiting on that day. But I believe it will come eventually.
Oh, I kid.
Kind of.
But somewhere around the twelve-week mark, it seemed to get easier. Or maybe I’d finally acclimated to sleeping in three- or four-hour stretches. And so I decided it was time to establish some sort of real schedule.
I’d heard all about the importance of “the schedule” throughout my pregnancy. Friends handed me all manner of books on the topic. All of which seemed to disagree on the best way to get your baby on a schedule but equally emphasized that failure to implement a schedule was likely to produce a child who would grow up to be covered in tattoos and living in a van down by the river.
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