A Life's Work

by Rachel Cusk

  As more time passed this elaborate spectre faded, and the muddled nights began to attain an insomniac clarity. My insides grew gritty, my nerves sharp. The baby continued to wake three or four times each night, and each time I was ready for her, trained and vigilant as a soldier. I no longer, it seemed, slept at all in the intervals, but merely rested silently like some legendary figure, itinerant, doughty and far from home. The reservoir of sleep I had accumulated through my life had run dry. I was living off air and adrenalin. Mercury ran through my veins. I wondered if this parched and dogged wraithe long since severed from its human past was in fact that dark stranger who walks the world of childhood wreathed in mystery: a parent.

  The lesson of sleep is a lesson in loneliness. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the child Jane’s cruel Aunt Reed locks her in the Red Room for the night with just such a lesson in mind, keen to instruct her in her orphaned state, to remind her not to presume that she is loved. Left without a candle in the ghostly chamber, Jane learns quickly enough that she is not; but her terror soon exceeds this sorry fact. Alone in the dark, she begins to dwell upon death. She suspects that her Uncle Reed died in that very room. In a frenzy of terror, she has a hallucinatory, or actual, encounter with a ghost. She begins to scream and cry and beat at the door to be let out, and eventually the servants come.

  ‘She has screamed out on purpose,’ declared Abbot, in some disgust. ‘And what a scream! If she had been in great pain one would have excused it, but she only wanted to bring us all here; I know her naughty tricks.’

  Aunt Reed demands that Jane is returned to the room and locked in.

  ‘I abhor artifice,’ she says, ‘particularly in children; it is my duty to show you that tricks will not answer; you will now stay here an hour longer, and it is only on condition of perfect submission and stillness that I shall liberate you then.’

  Jane faints with fear; when she is finally retrieved, she is delerious and violently ill.

  Much later, when Jane returns to attend Aunt Reed’s deathbed, this experience is still in her mind. In the intervening years she has learned to understand night as the place in which truth is revealed; as the opposite to day, the dissimulator. Night is when young girls die of starvation and neglect in boarding schools; it is when mad secret wives prowl the corridors; it is when the homeless and friendless plead in vain for human clemency. Jane has reckoned with the night, and emerged formidable.

  ‘I felt a determination to subdue her,’ she says of her dying aunt, as she sits at her bedside one night, ‘to be her mistress in spite both of her nature and her will.’ Aunt Reed begins to ramble. She asks whatever happened to Jane Eyre.

  ‘What did they do with her at Lowood? The fever broke out there, and many of the pupils died. She, however, did not die: but I said she did – I wish she had died!’

  ‘A strange wish, Mrs Reed; why do you hate her so?’

  Aunt Reed replies that it was jealousy. Her late husband loved the orphaned baby Jane, in spite of the fact that ‘it would wail in its cradle all night long – not screaming heartily like any other child, but whimpering and moaning.’ He made her promise, when he died, to look after the child, a promise she broke. Jane mightily confers her forgiveness on her aunt, but the woman hates her too much to accept it. She dies later that night. The next morning Jane and Aunt Reed’s daughter Eliza come to pay their respects to the body. ‘Neither of us,’ Jane observes as they leave, ‘had dropped a tear.’

  I wonder whether I am constructing a fortress against notions of helplessness and abandonment. These notions are entertained, as they are refuted, by myself alone. At night I am plagued by the fact of my child’s physical separateness from me, a fact I am at one minute tempted to conceal, the next to promulgate. My uncertainty about our mutual distinctness breeds in this division between day and night. I wonder whether my daughter has noticed that in one half of her life she is fed, admired, served, delighted in, played with and lavished with care, while in the other she is left on her own in the dark. By day her cries are met with brisk, even anxious service. By night, even if she manages to make a noise that sounds exactly like she has pushed her head through the bars of her cot and is being slowly strangled, they are increasingly ignored.

  The secret life of parents, like that of lovers, is nocturnal and effervescent, full of strange pacts and compromises, of fallings-out and reconciliations both violent and meaningless. The search for the limits of love, it rapidly becomes clear, is indistinguishable from the search for the limits of our isolation. In this sense the night lies before the fact of being alone like a swathe of green-belt before the developer’s eye, its pristine emptiness an invitation to fill, to despoil. The child quickly comes to question the orthodoxy of darkness, to express affront at the idea that emotion should be confined to the hours of daylight. I try to remember when and how I myself came to accept this convention, and suspect that it was very recently, perhaps only when it fell to me to pass it on, amidst so many other slightly unauthentic representations of the world, to my daughter. Restless nights stretch back through my recollection like an eerie avenue populated by myself alone: nights when I was afraid and dared not disturb my parents, and later, when I was unhappy and dared not disturb the cause of my unhappiness; or dared, and discovered that the end of love is the refusal to let the loved one sleep. It is also a method used in torture camps, as new parents will eagerly be told, usually by other parents; a piece of apocrypha frequently recounted in the manner of an SOS, an urgent call for rescue from a domestic torture camp to whose existence the free world displays a profound indifference. I want my daughter to find out how people cool and turn away when you won’t let them alone, how assurance is destroyed where it is most desperately sought; and yet at the same time I want to recast this awful truth for her, to make it untrue. Sometimes the power I have to love her seems like the power to transform wrong into right, to turn night into day.

  I meet a woman who tells me that her children, now grown up and gone away, never slept at night. She and her husband would take it in turns to get up with them, night after night, and take them downstairs to play until they were tired enough to go back to bed. They still don’t really sleep, she says. Her son stays up late listening to music, the sole tenant now of those lonely hours. I suddenly see that sleep is something you have to learn, like table manners. Conveniently, there are books on the subject. Many of them are written by doctors and therapists and hence are full of case histories, which I enjoy voyeuristically: a woman who would sit by her child’s crib for hours beating a drum; a toddler who consumed a full bottle of milk every two hours, bottles which her parents would line up on the windowsill at the beginning of the night and then go in automatically at the stated intervals to hand to her; a child who could only go to sleep while his parents were sitting on the sofa downstairs watching television, an activity they were consequently forced to get out of bed and indulge in each of the several times a night he woke up. Dr Richard Ferber, in Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, relates the case of Betsy, a ten-month-old baby.

  In the evening Betsy’s mother or father had to rock her and rub her back until she fell asleep, which usually took twenty minutes. They said that Betsy seemed to be trying to stay awake instead of letting herself fall asleep. She would begin to doze off then would suddenly open her eyes and look around before starting to nod off again. Her parents could not move her into the cot until she had been solidly asleep for fifteen minutes, or she would wake and start crying again. It was difficult to decide when her sleep was deep enough for her to be moved successfully. If her mother or father moved too soon from the rocking chair, she might wake and they would have to start all over again … Between midnight and 4.00 am, Betsy would wake several times. Each time she would cry vigorously and would not settle on her own. At these times she did not seem to be in pain, and in fact when her mother or father went in, picked her up and began to rock her, she would quiet promptly and return to sleep quickly … On one occasion, at [a] do
ctor’s suggestion, they planned to let her cry until she fell asleep on her own. Betsy just cried harder and harder, and after an hour and a half her parents decided they were being cruel.

  I feel a certain warmth for Betsy’s parents, if not for Betsy herself. Their story reassures me of the existence, somewhere between the loud ranks of those who claim never or always to have left their children to cry, of a confederacy of vacillators and fools, of which I am a member. The night comes on like a storm over a desolate sea, upon which we sail in an uncaptained ship deploying measures by turns drastic and sentimental. We are heroic and cruel, authoritative and then servile, cleaving to our guesses and inspirations and bizarre rituals in the absence of any real understanding of what we are doing or how it should properly be done. A friend comes to stay overnight, and in the morning puts a slow and disbelieving head around our bedroom door. Since we last saw her, the evening before, we have run marathons, negotiated the Maastricht Treaty, extinguished forest fires. Our daughter now sits on the bed between our broken bodies like some triumphal mini-Napoleon, waving her rattle in victory. The friend has overheard from her room something of our nocturnal adventures, and come away with the – mostly correct – impression that nobody slept at all. You’ve got to do something, she says. You’re making a rod for your own back. A desire to cry and confess, to seek some impartial, therapeutic embrace comes over me. I feel suddenly that I have experienced trauma. For almost a year of nights I have gone to bed as one would go to bed knowing that the front door was wide open, that there was something on the stove, that the alarm clock was set to go off hourly until dawn, with a new method of silencing it to be devised somehow each time. I have gone to bed like other people get up for work, alert, keyed up, and steeled for battle.

  I consult Dr Ferber, who assures me that in all his years of practice he has never met a child who couldn’t become a champion sleeper, bar those with serious disabilities. I am halted in my reading by thoughts of those disabled children and their parents. Dr Ferber has been wise to mention them so insouciantly. I read on, understanding that I have not experienced trauma, merely inconvenience. Do not sedate your child, continues Dr Ferber; in the end drugs just make the problem worse. I had not, in fact, considered this option. I consider it now. Dr Ferber clearly believes that children’s sleep problems are caused by their parents. You’ll leave them to cry, he says, but you won’t leave them to go to sleep. Mentally I swat myself away like some persistent, sleep-depriving fly. I recognise that the sleep battle indeed seems to occur at the furthest frontier of what a particular parent will tolerate. The authors of My Child Won’t Sleep concur in this theory: a decision by the parents to resolve the problem, they say, usually itself resolves the problem. I begin to imagine my daughter as some curious incubus, a small, fleshly enactment of my own nightmares. I see that I must cast her out of my dreams – but how?

  Dr Ferber does not strictly believe in leaving children to cry. Leaving them to cry, he says, results in a lot of crying. I am beginning to find Ferber intriguingly complex. Some crying is inevitable, he adds. At first the baby’s expectations are going to be confounded, which will make her cry; but she’ll soon see what you’re up to. The suggestion is that she’ll see what we’re up to and go along with it, rather than report us to the authorities. So what are we up to, anyway? I am invited to turn to page 74 to review Ferber’s timetable. It is composed of columns of figures strictly denoting intervals at which you are permitted briefly to visit your crying baby. My eye wanders to the opposite page, on which there is printed another timetable with columns of figures entitled ‘Helping your child learn to stay in bed: Number of minutes to hold the door closed if your child will not stay in bed’. I retreat nervously to the first timetable. Our goal, I am told in a footnote, is to leave the baby in her crib all night without the embellishments of rocking, rubbing, patting, feeding, or, presumably, violent outbursts of rage on my part, while at the same time not giving her the impression that we have gone out, or away on holiday. By briefly visiting her when she cries, says Ferber, you are leading her not to abandon hope, but to make a choice: this choice being that it is preferable to go to sleep than to have someone bursting into your room every seven minutes, staring at you with an expression of dumb tragedy, and then leaving. My Child Won’t Sleep recommends a similar procedure, which it calls ‘checking’. ‘Checking’ is more parent-oriented than ‘visiting’, being designed to reassure you that the crying is not caused by physical injury, or by a desperate neighbour climbing through the bedroom window and attempting to murder the baby. But the superior science of ‘visiting’ lies in the fact that the intervals between visits are gradually lengthened the more the baby cries. The baby is thus kept on a losing wicket. Dr Ferber provides you with a chart to fill in, indicating your child’s sleep patterns, to keep you busy while you’re waiting.

  It’s only mid-afternoon, but I fill in the chart immediately in a sudden access of self-pity. It involves shading in squares for those hours during which the baby sleeps, while leaving hours when she is awake and crying blank. By the end the chart resembles a piano keyboard, or a graveyard. Ferber goes on to detail the case of a woman whose husband insisted that she get up to breastfeed their baby several times a night, as it was the only way to get the child back to sleep. The woman soon became disaffected with both the husband and the baby, although she wisely visited Dr Ferber before taking herself and her breasts elsewhere. I am too proud, I realise, to follow Ferber’s advice to the letter, but one night I do attempt an approximation of it. My daughter rips off and devours the early intervals between visits in one sneering swallow. Eight minutes? Thirteen? What, she roars, you think I’m chicken? An interval of thirty-five minutes elapses. We lie silently in the darkness, arms folded across our chests, like courtly figures on a tomb. Next door the baby rages, bellows, chokes, appears to stop breathing for minutes at a time. I wonder whether she’s actually ill. I am convinced that I can detect a note of suffering in her cries, a plaintive sound amid the solid chords of outrage. I think there’s something wrong with her, I say, leaping to my feet. Moments later she is in our bed, slurping baby medicine from a spoon and chortling. The next night we try again. I have hardened my heart. I visit cursorily, coldly, and am blown from the room upon gusts of infant fury. By 2 am she has worked her way through Ferber’s timetable and sustained an episode of uninterrupted crying of three and a quarter hours; some way beyond the maximum of which the doctor’s scheme conceives. The knowledge that we are now on our own in uncharted territory, territory wherein the good doctor dares not wander, territory populated by chimeras of cruelty, child abuse and perhaps even crying-related brain damage hangs over us. Mysteriously, the crying stops. I strain to listen, and presently hear the softer, paroxysmic sound of sobbing. A feeling of guilt, and of some awful fore-knowledge, propels me into the baby’s room, where I find her standing up but apparently asleep, her body pressed against the side of her crib, her fists gripping the bars, her small face crushed into the gap between. A convulsive sob and sigh issues from it. Gently I prise the body loose, lay it down and cover it in blankets, as dolefully as if I were interring it.

  I return to bed. The dark house is filled with silence. It is a silence I feel I have purchased brutally, illegally, like a death by contract. I remember reading somewhere that in primitive societies people sleep all together, huddled with their babies in groups; around a fire, perhaps, built to keep the wild animals away. They do not sit outside their children’s bedrooms with a stopwatch and a childcare manual at 3 am. I know that in spite of its old associations with poverty and incest, co-sleeping, as it is called, is adhered to with evangelical fervour in some quarters and queen-sizes. In this far-flung region of the night, I guiltily ponder the co-sleeping philosophy. I relive my daughter’s cries, now hearing in them a certain justice, as if she had gone to the gallows protesting her innocence. We’re not supposed to sleep all alone in separate rooms! she pleads. In primitive societies they sleep together around a l
ovely fire, with animals! ‘To doubt the basic proposition of sleep occurring in separate beds in separate rooms is like doubting the honesty of the police, or whether doctors know what they are doing. The world changes colour. A daunting new sphere of effort, decision and judgement is revealed.

  Nevertheless I toss and turn, increasingly certain that I have done some terrible wrong. I consider going in and waking her up in order to offer some atonement. An hour or two passes. Presently a noise from the baby’s room, at first sporadic, then persistent, threads its way through my tormented ruminations. There is a rustle, a creak, then a thud. Silence. Rustle, creak, thud. Rustle, creak, thud. I hear her voice, not crying but sort of talking. Rustle, creak, thud. Delighted laughter, like someone at a cocktail party. Silently I rise and go in. Through the darkness I can make out a curious shape in the baby’s crib, a sort of blanketed pyramid. With a creak it slowly topples over on to its side and lands with a thump on the mattress. More solitary laughter. Beneath the blankets the baby raises her bottom in the air again, balancing on her hands and feet to form a human triangle. Thump, over she goes. I retreat to my room, confused and somewhat afraid. Thus far I have journeyed through a year of nights using only two emotional gears, anger and remorse. This new situation is outside the range of both. She is not crying, nor unhappy, nor in fact demanding anything of me at all; and yet in spite of its self-sufficiency, the bizarreness of her behaviour cannot but provoke and trouble me, while, according to the terms of our sleep war, depriving me of the right to intervene. She appears to have come to an early understanding of the nature of adolescence.