Given Up for You by Erin O. White

Author:Erin O. White
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780299318284
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

Before Grace was born we thought we might do some traveling during Chris’s maternity leave. Maybe the beach for a little while, or New York. After all, who knew when Chris would have so much time off from work again? But Grace cried too much and slept too erratically for us to travel with her. Soothing her each evening took hours of Herculean effort: walking, bouncing on a yoga ball, doing deep knee bends with her swaddled and pressed against our chests. Chris made CDs of the songs that seemed to quiet her, songs by Joni Mitchell, Ritchie Havens, Cat Stevens. She was our seventies baby. Chris burned the CDs on our computer and then made up titles for them, labeling each disk with a Sharpie: “Milk Dud,” “Blast Off Waltz,” “Morning Bliss.” Eventually we discovered that k.d. lang’s cover of “A Case of You” could soothe Grace like no other song could, and so Chris made a CD that was a continuous loop of it. When we put the CD on in the car, Grace would almost immediately stop crying and start looking out the window pensively, as though remembering many a lonesome evening spent in the blue TV screen light. Chris and I couldn’t stop laughing the first time we put on the song and saw Grace’s wistful expression. “I feel like we should offer her a sippy cup of scotch,” Chris said.

Grace was a fast baby. She was born after five hours of labor and twenty minutes of pushing. She could finish nursing in less than ten minutes (both sides) and finish a nap in twenty-five. And until she was a year old, she only napped in our arms, or in her stroller, never in her crib or in the white wicker Moses basket my mother had kindly bought for me a few weeks before Grace was born. Grace took approximately one nap in that Moses basket, a nap my mother clocked at thirteen minutes long. By the time Grace was two weeks old the Moses basket was entirely filled with diapers and burp clothes and pacifiers still in their wrapping. I kept it only because I thought maybe someday Grace would want it for her dolls, a thought that I now admire for its perspective and its hope, considering how little of either I had in those days.

For months we tried to get Grace to sleep without us, letting her cry for ten then fifteen then twenty minutes, letting her cry until even Ferber himself would have picked her up. Grace was a beautiful baby, but she cried a lot.

And so she slept on us, because we needed the peace and quiet when and how we could get it. I often slept while I held her, or occupied myself by picking the cradle cap out of her hair, rubbing away the rivers of lint that gathered in the deep creases of her palms. I also read the New Yorker, mostly because its columned pages required only infrequent turning.

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