For the first few weeks I was always expecting to catch the baby, somehow, mid-death. If Dustin wasn’t watching me, I sat on the edge of our bed staring, my breath stopping when the baby’s did, my mind counting the seconds until he gasped, his tummy like a small balloon, filling up. I hovered over him, vigilant, while he slept, watching the reassuring rise and fall of his chest. During the day I puttered around the apartment, inventing reasons to walk by his bassinet and confirm he was still alive. It felt like this was what I was born to do: save my son just as he was slipping away forever, shake him awake before he left us and fell back to wherever it was he came from.
When we left the house with the baby nestled on Dustin’s chest in one of those elaborate fabric baby wraps, I would stop Dustin every few minutes to peek in, check he hadn’t suffocated. When we took the baby to lie on a blanket in the park, I knelt next to him, my eyes darting left and right, watching to make sure a bird or a squirrel didn’t swoop in and attack his face. I knew I was being ridiculous by any objective standards, or so went some paternal voice in my head, some superego mix of Dustin and a stern pediatrician.
The human body is a miraculous thing. Babies are resilient! He’s fine! He’s fine! He’s fine!
At night, whether he was crying or not, I woke up every hour or so with a gasp and shone the light of my phone over his face, put my fingers under his nose to feel for breath.
I knew that if the unthinkable—which is to say, the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about—happened, I would regret not staying awake all night with a flashlight pointed at his tiny chest, watching him breathe. My vigilance would seem worth it, unquestionably. Was this not my responsibility? My role? My body had built his body cell by cell by cell, spent almost a year putting him together in the dark, and now I was supposed to sit back and tend to him, keep him safe and alive with my milk but also—impossibly, it felt—trust that his body would do its work, that he would keep breathing all on his own.
I think it must have started in the hospital. In order for me to be discharged after the baby was born, there were a few things we had to accomplish. Forms to sign. Pamphlets to read. Hospital surveys to fill out. Dustin’s paternity to declare, since we weren’t married. I was supposed to take a shower, take a shit, be able to walk around on my own.
Then, last of all, there was the SIDS video. “Did you watch the video yet?” the nurses kept asking me, a little apologetic. “They make us tell you to. There’s a quiz you have to take.”
Sudden infant death syndrome. The leading cause of death for infants and a catchall term for the rare but distinct and haunting possibility that your child could die at any moment for no discernible reason. Everyone said there was no use ruminating on it because you couldn’t ever fully prevent it, you couldn’t control it, but then you were told not to co-sleep, not to put blankets in the baby’s crib, not to let him sleep on his stomach, as if to remind you that although you couldn’t guarantee that your child wouldn’t die—in fact, he surely would one day, as would we all—you were responsible for doing everything you could to make sure he didn’t. You couldn’t prevent death, but you could contribute to causing it. It might be your fault. Especially if you broke one of the rules from the video.
“Oh,” I said, caught off guard. “No, I haven’t done it yet,” I said, “but I think I know the gist,” which was a vast understatement. I could have given a lecture on SIDS to the National Institutes of Health, though all of my findings would have been horror stories posted on various internet forums that I’d sought out and read in the middle of the night just to torture myself.
Of course I aced the quiz, which went over the central tenets of the Back to Sleep campaign, started in the mid-1990s to encourage parents to put infants to sleep on their backs. The quiz had trick questions like “What kind of blanket should you put in the crib?” Answer: None, because the blanket could cover his face and he could suffocate. No pillows either. No loose clothing. The baby should sleep in the same room as you but not in your bed or on your chest as you’re rocking him in the middle of the night, only half awake yourself. Pacifiers help lower the risk of “dying in infancy of an unknown cause,” which was another way to say SIDS. Breastfeeding helps too. Maternal smoking is a risk factor for SIDS. As are pregnancy complications and premature birth. I had the list memorized but still Googled it on occasion to feel a sort of selfish reassurance that we would be spared. As in: Phew, my baby loves his pacifier, so it will be someone else, some other poor parent. As if there were a quota of babies who would die and mine was not one of them. At least for now. Not yet.
Even now, when I think of the term SIDS and look up the statistics, I hold my breath without meaning to, start to feel dizzy. I think of all the parents who do everything right and whose babies still die mysteriously in their cribs, on their backs. And I think of the parents who do the wrong thing, whether out of desperation or ignorance or defiance. I think of one family whose story I read in the middle of an anxiety-fueled night: We do not believe our son died because he was sleeping on the couch with his dad, one mother wrote, or something like that. Then she added that, while there was no way to know for sure, they had chosen to believe that their child would have died that night anyway, and they took comfort in the knowledge that he hadn’t spent his last moments alone. I think of all the times I fell asleep with the baby on my chest without meaning to. You just get so tired.
The Back to Sleep campaign has decreased SIDS deaths by 50 percent in the decade-plus it’s been around. It’s been a success, undeniably. But taking the quiz felt like touching the void. It made the truth impossible to ignore or repress: Death was inextricable from life. Our real task was not-killing a small, precious thing.
The macabre was everywhere, once I started looking. Breathability was advertised on all the baby products we bought, a word that used to mean fabric that didn’t cause a yeast infection but now referred to the lifesaving mesh in the sides of the bassinet or playpen. The baby’s crib came with a big warning about keeping it away from window blinds to avoid strangulation. I read it and froze where I was standing, visions of my baby, stiff and blue, flashing through my mind. Which I guess was the point. Thank God it was summer, so the omnipresent receiving blankets were all thin cotton. Even so, they were treacherous, like every other object. I imagined them falling into his crib in the middle of the night, inching up around his mouth like pythons as he slept, taking him from us in an instant.
One afternoon I was playing peekaboo with the baby, one of the blankets over my face, and Dustin caught me making a covert attempt to see if I could breathe through it. Just to test it.
“What’re you doing?” he said.
“Nothing! Whatever.”
“I did it too,” he admitted. I exhaled. Dustin was my standard of normalcy. I’d always harbored an obsession with death, or a too-keen awareness that it was coming for all of us, so I didn’t really trust my own brain. “Ever since you were a kid,” my mom would say, shaking her head. “I have no idea where you got it from.” I used to convince myself that my mom would get murdered on one of her long morning runs. Or that there was cancer hidden somewhere in my body. Or hers. I would lie in bed writing the story in my head, preemptively feeling guilty for all the bad things I wrote about her in my diary.
When I got older I imagined getting hit by a bus. Thrown onto the subway tracks. A brain aneurysm. Then once I met Dustin, or once I fell in love with him, my death fantasies transferred to him. Anytime he didn’t pick up his phone, he was obviously lying dead on the side of the road, run over by a semi while he rode his bike. Attacked when he left work late at night. Or he’d slipped and fallen while he cleaned our kitchen floor, been impaled by the mop. I guess I should have seen the baby-dying fear coming.
But even now, in hindsight, my fear seems rational to me. Infants lack the solidity of grown people, the layers of years lived and personality accrued—all the trappings that distract you from the horrible vulnerability a baby arrives with: a neck that bends in just a way to remind you of the arteries, the critical nerves, inside it; a nearly bald skull covered in nauseating blue veins, visible and running over the tops of the ears. The baby’s soft spot right at the crown of his head, no hair to hide the place where the skull has yet to fuse together, and—the worst part—it pulses with his heartbeats at odd intervals, as if to scream, I am just a mortal body, over and over.
Dustin thought the pulsing soft spot was funny. “It’s doing the thing again.”
“Ugh!” I couldn’t look away even though looking made me feel ill. I would do an exaggerated shudder, trying to shake off the horror like a dog shakes off water.
The more that people, especially Dustin, dismissed my fears, the less I trusted them. Babies do die, I wanted to say to everyone. I felt like sending them links to tragic blog posts. Don’t you see what we’re dealing with here? I would tell them. You think this is all elephant onesies and hooded towels, but it’s a matter of life and death!
It’s no one’s fault, people would have said if it had happened. But they might not have meant it.
I knew I wouldn’t have believed them. If the baby died, I’d have to answer to everyone, answer to myself as a mother. It was knowing that I would feel culpable forever, no matter what, that took my breath away. I tried playing out the worst-case scenario in my mind, hoping that confronting it would sap some of its power (nope). I’d push the stroller around the neighborhood thinking, Okay, so we would be very sad. Broken. Our lives would be defined by tragedy, just like the lives of all the people I’d read about on the internet, the ones whose babies had been born with severe birth defects or had been in terrible accidents or hadn’t survived birth. But eventually my life would go back to what it was like pre-baby. We’d travel. Sleep late again. I’d write about it. In a way, the baby dying was more fathomable than him living. That we were falling deeply in love, that the stakes were higher than they’d ever been before, and we would have to live with it, with loving like this—that was harder to take in than the possibility of a great tragedy.
I read a story on a parenting forum around this time that described my dark fantasy to a tee. A woman was at a parade with her children. She had her newborn in a stroller covered by a thin blanket so that the baby could nap in peace while she tended to the rest of her family. Suddenly, or so she wrote, something came over her, some intuition, and she rushed over to the stroller, flung off the blanket, and crouched down to stare at her son. She squinted at him, watching his chest for movement, and saw nothing. Without stopping to think, she reached out to him and shook him awake. As she told it, this caused him to startle, open his eyes wide, and gasp for air.
“I saved my baby’s life,” she wrote. “I’m sure of it.” She was clearly still shaken, as was everyone else reading about it on the forum, up all night with their own inscrutable infants. “I don’t even want to think what would have happened if I hadn’t run over to him,” she said. People wrote, Thank God, and said they’d hug their babies closer that night. (But not too close.) The image of the baby, shaken awake, taking in a huge gasp of air, played on a loop in my head, though even at the time I didn’t really believe she’d saved her baby’s life. Sleep apnea, I argued, trying to reassure myself, or maybe he was simply between breaths. What really plagued me was the decisive, intuitive action of the mother, who’d put down her paper plate of potato salad or corn on the cob or whatever it was to go running over to her son.
It was that gut feeling, the same one that would send me, a little quicker than necessary, over to peer into the baby’s bassinet. What if, when it came down to it, I didn’t get the feeling? Or what if I had to stop listening to the feeling because it kept overfiring, and then, as soon as I stopped, as soon as I relaxed, the bad thing happened? What if my gut feelings—Something bad has happened!—were simply anxiety, simply hormones, simply the result of too many tragic stories I had tried to hold in my brain and live through, as if an act of radical empathy could spare me, render me immortal? What if I couldn’t be trusted? What’s neurosis and what’s maternal instinct?
I knew, though, that if I listened to every bad feeling, it would take over my mind. I’d never do anything else. I would be pulling the car over every time I called out to him and he, an infant who couldn’t say words yet, didn’t answer. You’re being ridiculous, I would tell myself. He’s fine. I’d keep driving, then think, But what if he is dead? And then for the rest of my life I’d think about how I sat there with my gut feeling and ignored it.
And so I would try to watch myself as if from a distance. I would observe the panic rising up in me when, say, the light shifted and the baby’s face looked a disturbing shade of gray. Was he smiling at me but secretly suffocating? Would I know it if I saw it? I can still feel it in my neck, adrenaline shooting out from wherever, tension rising up my neck, a jolt of dread in my solar plexus, and a ringing in my ears before I snatched him up in my arms and held him under a different light and then caught my breath, happy to know it was just me, just my awful brain.
When the baby started crawling, I was afraid he’d fall down the stairs. When he started walking, that he’d wander into traffic. For a while I was convinced he would fall off the porch, go rolling down the cement front steps and onto the sidewalk and then into the road just as a car came flying down the street. I imagined boiling pasta water spilling onto his face, a knife falling from the counter and landing in some unspeakably unlucky area of his tiny body. I saw neck-breaking falls from playground equipment, even when Dustin had taken him and I was at home unloading the dishwasher. I saw all these scenarios in vivid flashes, as if they were in a movie. I’d try to shake them out of my head. I’d squeeze my eyes shut sometimes. My breath would catch.
Dustin maintained that I was crazy, but on the rare nights we went on dates that first year, I’d see he was a little crazy too. We only ever went out when a family member was in town, when we had no real excuse not to. We knew it was a good idea to go. To “reconnect.” Then we’d both sit there at the restaurant, checking our phones throughout dinner.
“He’s probably not dead, right?” he’d ask.
“Nah,” I’d say, happy to play the chill parent for once. “She would have called if he died.” Dustin would nod and try to change the subject but I’d stare off into space, panic growing. I imagined the baby dying at that very moment and us thinking about the irony of our conversation for the rest of our lives.
“Well, I’ll just text and check in,” I’d say, hiding my phone under the table, blushing from the wine.
After we came home from dinner one such night—the restaurant was just around the corner, within running distance, just in case—I chatted with Dustin’s sister, Piper, while Dustin walked into our living room, where the baby was asleep in the crib. I wanted desperately to rush over to him, just to look at him, to visually confirm he had survived the hour without us. But like so many other times, in the interest of appearing sane, I fought my urge. I rinsed out a bottle of breast milk, asked Piper how she’d been, trying to act cool. Dustin came back into the kitchen. “How is he?” I asked.
“He’s alive,” Dustin said, putting his arm around me, knowing that was my real question. I couldn’t take it anymore and slipped out from under his arm and rushed to go check on the baby, fearing the word alive was tempting fate. “You’re not going to like what you see!” Dustin called after me.
I leaned over the crib and gasped. The baby was lying facedown, his arms by his sides, looking like a corpse. He was breathing, not to mention sound asleep, but I grabbed him out of the crib anyway, adrenaline rushing through me. “Mama’s here,” I said to him, using that word out loud for the first time and feeling it, too, as if my vulnerability were what called the name, the role, into being.
I didn’t know before that when parents talked about “checking on” their children, they meant checking to make sure they weren’t dead. And when they talked about their love for their children, maybe that was what they meant too. It was love but keener, with sharper edges, softer undersides. It was love wrapped up with desperate terror, inextricable.
That spring, when the baby was nine months old, my sister visited us from Chicago. At that point, the baby was sitting and clapping and doing a funny crawl, one where he pushed his body forward with one foot—like lizard pose in yoga, his foot flat on the ground—the other leg trailing behind. He was joyful. He was bald, strangely attentive and perceptive, and starting to talk. He sat in my sister’s lap and grinned at her, reaching for her hair. We decided that first morning she was there that we were going to go out to breakfast, where our son would bounce on our laps and eat small fistfuls of biscuit.
On the way out the door, I started to buckle the baby carrier around my waist and then stopped myself. “Do you want to carry him?” I asked my sister. Younger sisters usually love this sort of thing; anything for a photo they can post on Facebook.
She said no, she didn’t want to wear the carrier. I was taken aback. “Why not?”
She started walking ahead of us and then spun around, shrugging. “I’ve always been afraid of falling over wearing one of those things—like, what if you fell forward on top of the baby?” She laughed like she knew she was being ridiculous but also like she wanted to make sure we’d considered this possibility.
I waved the thought away. Dustin had been over the same thing with me before. “You’re extra-aware when you have it on,” I said. “Plus, when have you ever fallen forward, onto your face? That doesn’t happen.” Anyway, Dustin was the one who usually carried the baby. He was the man, after all, and therefore stronger. It made sense in my head, in a subconscious way, like how I always slid into the passenger seat before a long trip without offering to drive.
After breakfast, though, I started putting on the carrier. “You’re taking him?” Dustin said.
“Yeah,” I said with a slight attitude, “clearly.” He had been off bussing our tray and I’d figured I might as well take the opportunity to display some maternal authority for my sister.
On the short walk home from breakfast, the sun came out and we sang “The Ants Go Marching” out loud. Couples walked past us on the sidewalk holding hands, probably headed down the main drag to the same place for biscuits. I was thinking about what a beautiful day it was when my Dansko clog caught on an edge of the sidewalk. My body resisted gravity at first, and I started waving my arms in the air like a tightrope walker trying to balance herself. I think I took another galloping step.
I have a clear memory of time slowing down. I remember thinking, No, no, no, as I flew forward in the air, and then I realized that if I pretended it wasn’t happening, the fall would be worse, but if I accepted the fact that I was going to fall, I could try to fall well. I could see my sister and Dustin standing there, not quite getting what was happening. I willed my whole body to turn in midair and flung my left shoulder back, twisting thirty degrees to the right, so that instead of falling flat on my face, I would land on my side.
I did it somehow; I spun in the air, and my right hip and shoulder hit the ground first. I had hugged the baby to me in the carrier on the way down but he was wailing. I started crying too. He had a giant scrape on his head, but I insisted he hadn’t hit the ground. Dustin ran the few steps over to us and quickly unbuckled the carrier. “Give him to me,” he said.
“How did you do that?” my sister said in awe. I slowly staggered to my feet and pulled pebbles and dirt out of my hand.
“I don’t even know!” I was flabbergasted, terrified. I tried to get a closer look at the baby. “Is he okay?” I said, desperate.
“He’s fine,” Dustin said, pulling him out of my sight. “You have to promise never to wear those shoes again, okay? Not around the baby.”
“Okay,” I said, stung. Of course it had been me. But my heroism! I wanted to say. The twist! I bent our fate! I intervened! Then again, it was still my fault. I fell. The baby was hurt and I was responsible. But wasn’t I, who had given him life, responsible for everything?
Dustin held the baby and we resumed singing “The Ants Go Marching,” not stopping until we were home, and at some point he stopped crying and all of us calmed down. Maybe all it takes is distraction. For you and the baby, for everyone. Think about other things. Stop thinking about all the bad things that could happen. Not because they can’t happen but because it’s the only way to calm down.
I looked at the baby and at the scrape on his head that Dustin let me believe was a sort of rug burn from the baby carrier. I felt sick to my stomach but hugely relieved. Something lifted then, if temporarily. The bad thing had happened and the baby had survived. He could be hurt without dying. He could endure my mistakes. He was vulnerable but resilient. Human. Wasn’t that the problem, in the end? He was going to walk around in the world where there were a million different ways to die. One day something would kill him. And I loved him too much for that. And yet. What else is there to say?