The monitor was about to go off. It hadn’t erupted just yet, but as I lay in bed I knew it was only a matter of time. You can tell when a baby monitor is about to blow up because the baby makes a series of pre-cry sounds that clue you in. Little hacks and scratches and cries—oooooehhhhh, durrrrrr, ewwooohhhh. Through the static of the monitor, it sounds like a mouse caught in a glue trap.
I didn’t move a muscle. My strategy was twofold. For one thing, I thought to myself: If I just stay still, then the baby will forget I exist and realize she has no one to cry to, and then she will stop crying (NOTE: Babies do not fall for this). For another, I thought if I lay still long enough, my wife would get up and go feed the baby instead of me. I was awake, but I didn’t want to be awake any longer. So I played dead. I tried to ignore the monitor and began thinking of purple unicorns and flying ninjas and any other random shit that would lead me to a dreamful slumber. Then I heard another oooooehhhhh and my brain zeroed right back in on the monitor. The child is waking. The child is hungry. Fuckity fuck fuck. My wife was lying next to me in bed. She was perfectly still, an expert in not giving herself away.
Our first kid was now two months old. Before she was born, we prepared a bassinet for her. It was the same bassinet my mother-in-law had used for my wife when she was a baby and their family lived in Munich. My wife labored over successive weekends to restore it, sanding it down and repainting it clean white. The main basket had come loose from its wheeled base, so I lovingly repaired it, drilling new holes and driving in shiny new screws to make the bassinet secure, so that the girl could sleep peacefully next to our bed for as long as she liked. It was beautiful. I imagined night after night of her sleeping next to us, one little happy family tucked inside the little master bedroom of our little home.
The first night we put her in it, she screamed bloody murder for hours. Turned out she loathed it. We threw her in a crib in the nursery next door a few days later, and the bassinet became worthless. Babies don’t give a shit how hard you worked on something. They’re the harshest critics on earth.
We made a rule that we would take turns every night feeding her. Someone got the first feeding. Then, once the baby was back asleep, that person went to sleep and the other person handled the child the next time she woke up. That was a fair way of going about things. But on this particular night, we had forgotten to agree on who was gonna get the first feeding. We both knew that whoever got the first feeding was boned because the parent working the first shift had to wake up around midnight, the time of night when deep sleep takes root. And then, that same parent might have to get up again for a third shift, around 4:00 or 5:00 A.M.
I didn’t want the first shift. My wife didn’t want the first shift. Someone was gonna lose.
A baby monitor is an inherently flawed product. You don’t really need one, but every family has one because every mom is terrified that she’ll sleep through her baby’s cries and then the baby will starve to death in the middle of the night and she’ll wake up in the morning to find a stiff baby corpse in the crib. This has never happened in recorded history, ever. A baby is capable of crying loud enough to wake a car accident victim hooked on fentanyl. All the monitor does is amplify that crying, really driving those cries through your eardrum so that they eat into your brain and make you want to fucking die. Soon, the monitor enslaves you, sending you running any time the baby so much as smacks her lips.
We bought a cheap First Years baby monitor at the Buy Buy Baby. It was the only audio monitor they had left. The rest of the shelf was stocked with video monitors, which are expensive and pointless and scared the shit out of me because I imagined looking at the baby video monitor in the middle of the night and seeing a ghost on the screen. The forty-dollar audio one we bought had a series of lights on top displayed in an arc. When the baby made a teeny tiny bit of noise, the green lights on the left would light up. When the baby cried a bit more, the yellow lights in the center would join in. And when the baby was crying like someone was stabbing her to death, the red lights on the right would engage. Right now, the lights were green. They would not remain that way for long.
Oooooehhhhh.
I remained motionless. My wife did likewise. Suddenly, I realized that I had to scratch my face. I’m one of those people who has to scratch himself in random places (including the scrotum) constantly, particularly right before bed. It’s like sleeping next to a meth head. If I didn’t scratch my face, I was gonna have a seizure. But I didn’t want to give myself away so I quickly clawed at my own eyes and then went back to lying still, hoping my wife wouldn’t notice. Then she turned on her side. She had clearly taken my face scratch and interpreted it as a sign that she had free rein to execute a move of her own and then go back to pretending she was asleep. But she wasn’t asleep at all. She was faking it, which outraged me despite the fact that I was also faking it.