A very public experiment: Part 7

“Your turn,” Dana mumbled, rolling over and taking the covers with her.

My head burrowed under the pillow lumps.

“But I just had the last turn!”

“No,” Dana grunted, and from the sound of it, it was clear her mouth had barely opened to let the words crawl out, “You slept through the last one.”

The crying from the other room grew louder. The crib we had assembled in Emmeline’s room before her birth remained unused for the first long months of her tiny life, replaced by a stroller-cum-bassinet we wheeled next to our bed. If the baby cried or needed a bottle, we could hoist her out of the bassinet and cuddle next to her in bed. But at some point, we decided it was time for her to sleep on her own. I don’t remember the reasoning behind it — some people would have you believe that 24-hour-a-day cuddling was all a baby needed, while saner people who have actually had children would tell you that if you place a baby far enough away, you might not be able to hear them at all.

So we moved Emme into her own room, just down a five-foot hall from ours. We had a baby monitor next to our bed, but because the distance between us was so short, we’d often hear the cries before they were relayed through the electronic cosmos and into the monitor — which became, more or less, a deafening echo of our sleeplessness.

“My turn, OK, OK,” I said, removing the covers completely. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, gathering the strength to stand up. It was too much work to crane my neck to look at the clock, but from the moody, purple light streaming through our windows, I could tell there had been a change in the night — that some miraculous shifting of rays and atmospheric refraction was underfoot and that soon it would be a new day. It filled me with an easy comfort: the dark would soon pass.

From somewhere, I couldn’t tell if it was the monitor or the hallway, the cries continued. Grew louder even.

“Are you sleeping?” Dana said, sitting up now herself.

“I think she’s crying,” I mumbled.

“I know she’s crying. It’s your turn to get her.”

“I did.”

“No you didn’t,” Dana said, “You’ve just been sitting there.”

I looked at my feet. They were dangling an inch above the floor. My body slumped to the side, as if leaning against an invisible wall. I grabbed my head with both hands and then rubbed my eyes, blinking away the sudden constellation behind my eyelids. There was a strange new noise in the room, a truncated rumble I could not place. It disappeared when Dana poked me.

“Jesus, dude,” she said, “Are you snoring now?”

Through some unknown, hidden reserve of will, I felt my feet hit the floor and they seemed to move out of the room on their own, pulling the rest of my body with them. I crept into Emme’s room, the one curtain drawn and blocking out any hint of daylight. I poked my head into Emme’s crib, her body wrapped in a swaddle. We subscribed to a brand of newborn care that probably seemed crazy to our own parents, but we found it worked miracles. The idea was to mimic all the comfort and sound of the womb: wrapping the baby in a swaddle, as if she was still hugged tightly against the uterine walls; offering loud shooshes to calm her and mimic the whir and gush of blood around the womb; even jostling her gently to recall the shuffle and bumping she must have felt while in development.

In the low light spilling in from the hallway, I could see Emme struggle against her swaddle, a free arm frantically swatting at her face.

“Broke free, huh?” I whispered, picking her up. There were nights I called her the Teeny Houdini, because no matter how tightly I bound her errant limbs, she found a way to break free. And also because occasionally, depending on the quality of that night’s sleep and the number of times she broke free in the night, I contemplated replacing the swaddle with real chains. And a lock. “Come here, you,” I whispered.

She felt so light in my arms. Except for the free arm, the rest of her body was wrapped in a green blanket, just her head sticking out at the top and smiling up at her new visitor. She looked like a human caterpillar, some smiling, maniacal Dodgson character — a storybook creation.

“You’re not sleepy are you?” I asked, half expecting an answer. She smiled again at the words, and I couldn’t resist tickling her chin. I unwrapped her body and watched her legs leap at the air like a frog, kicking and jerking. Her arms worked like a water pump, going up and down.

“No no no,” I said, “It’s not morning, I swear. It’s bed time. It’s bed time.”

You don’t forget the first time your baby smiles at you. In the first weeks, you realize the awkward grins and grimaces are nothing more than gas — bubbles caught in the chest and pushing their way up or down, depending. But then something happens a few weeks in — the eyes grow wider, the lips come under some control. And it might be a word or a tiny tickle that does it — forcing the lips to curve upward and the eyes to crinkle. A tiny, burbling squeal arrives and you can’t tell who made the sound: you or the baby.

The first time it happened for us, Dana was still asleep in the bedroom. I had gotten up to hang out with Emme, bringing her into the living room where we had a mat set up on our ottoman. The mat had mirrors and crinkly toys attached to it, little things she could look at or munch on. The mat also included a structure that rose into the air, and you could dangle little animals off of it. In the loopy, sleepless hours of early morning, I made up endless stories about the animals, explaining to Emme that the colorful stuffed elephant was a doctor and its neighbor, a giraffe, was its lesbian partner. The stories, I know, were unclear to her — wild sounds warbling unformed through the ether — but I can’t help but think Emme took some strange joy from all the fun I was having.

“And at the end of the day, they went home together and got ready for their book club,” I’d explain.

I unhooked the elephant and used its trunk to tickle Emme’s nose, making faces and whispering all those silly sounds you swore you’d never utter. And that’s when it happened. A small giggle escaped her throat and slipped out of her lips and her eyes crinkled in delight.

“Hey!” I said, tickling her again as she laughed. She hadn’t yet mastered the ability to control her arms and so in hindsight it seemed unfair, torturing her for an hour with tickles under the chin. But I felt like some drug addict, addicted to the sound of her quiet laughter filling the house.

The mornings were usually ours. I’d get up early to feed her and change her and read her stories until she squirmed out of my arms, while Dana remained in bed, gathering the rest she’d never get once I left for work.

Emme and I continued our walks, leaving the house before the sun rose and traipsing around the neighborhood. We lived just a block away from Lombard Street, the famed Crookedest Street in the World, and I loved to take her to the top of the hills. We’d sit together on a bench and I’d unwrap her from a sling, pointing out the dawn as it came streaming pink and pale blue into the sky. It always reminded me of some Renaissance pastoral, bringing light and color out of the centuries of darkness and adding new joy to the world around it.

“See there,” I’d point, “See way over there? That’s where your mom and dad were raised.”

I pointed across the water, over the small grassy bay hills and into the valley, just barely visible beyond the marshes on a good day. No matter how tired I was or how much sleep I needed, I began to look forward to our quiet mornings together — watching the sky take shape from darkness to light, watching the curves of the land fall from steady mountains to curious marshes, while we studied each other under the slow changing light.

“I wish it had gone easier,” I told her one morning, the two of us alone on the hill, “I know it’s not your fault, and I’m ….”

A friend told me once you mastered one challenge of parenting, another arose to took its place. Our early struggles with feeding her forgotten and replaced by new struggles with sleeping. Some nights Emme would sleep for what seemed like the entire night, while others she would be awake for long, impossible stretches, ready to play. It felt like we were living back in our childhood homes, on the edge of the marshes — one foot on dry land and the other lost in the soup, trying to find a purchase.

Despite the struggles, there came a day when I hated going to work, not just for the senselessness of clocking in to a career I knew I was leaving soon. But because it was so difficult to leave her behind. What had happened, I wondered, in the previous weeks?

I printed out pictures of Emme and sprinkled them around my pod office, boring anyone who would stop by with stories of her exploits.

“Let me tell you,” I’d say, “She is the definition of regular!”

No personal moment was beyond taking a measure of parental pride.

Soon, I’d give up the commute and the workmates, replacing my days with strollers and quiet walks. While she was home, Dana started attending a playgroup and even went to a special mommy-and-me movie showing at a downtown cineplex. I’d sit at my desk and daydream about all the things we would do together. Then occasionally I’d catch myself falling asleep.

The morning Dana pushed me out of bed, I sat with Emme for a long time in a puffy green recliner, the swaddle forgotten on the ottoman in front of us. Morning came slowly and it became easier to make out the shapes in the room — the crib, the dresser, the features on her tiny face. Emme had stopped kicking and squirming — no more frog kicks or water pumps. She had exercised enough apparently. Her head was buried in the crook of my arm, looking up. I made faces at her and she smiled. I bent my head and touched the tip of my nose to hers and she giggled. I bobbed my head a few times and realized what it must have looked like: a penitent bowing before her, begging forgiveness. I stopped and looked in her eyes. They blinked slowly — a Morse code of sleepiness. Her tiny mouth opened and stretched wide.

“Not yet,” I whispered, “Not yet. I have to tell you something.”

She blinked again and her eyes remained closed. She crinkled her nose. I jostled her, lifting her head. Through the curtain, I could see the new light spilling in. A thin line of pinkish luster had replaced the moody purple and pushed through the curtain. The morning was upon us.

“Not yet,” I whispered, “Listen.”

Emme opened her eyes, sleepily searching among the shapes until she settled on my face.

“Listen,” I tried again, unable to form the words, as she closed her eyes a final time and rolled her head until her nose burrowed into my arm. Too tired to get up, I watched her until I fell asleep myself. This was usually our favorite time together — that unsteady ground caught between night and day, past and present, light and darkness — but the pull of something invisible cast a spell on us, and we slept quietly together in the gathering light.

The next day, Dana returned to work.