Peace and Quiet

We’re in a phase right now where Fresco needs jiggling to sleep. If you put him down in the crib, he flips and whether or not he can flip back is incidental; it just doesn’t occur to him. He likes looking at the ceiling too much.

I should clarify; he sleeps on his stomach and has been flipping on to his back, my frustrat(ed)ing little turtle. And if he could sleep on his back, I’d leave him be, but he can’t. He just gets more excited and more loud, holy hell he’s loud.

Anyway so I am spending a lot of time jiggling, left foot / right foot / left foot / right foot and sniffing his head and thinking calming thoughts so I am not thinking about all the other things I could be doing if I wasn’t jiggling this damn baby so much, things I used to be doing, back when I didn’t have to jiggle this damn baby so much. More and more, my mind comes back to labouring with him, delivering him, seeing him for the first time. Back even, to the afternoon of the night I went into labour, big and cumbersome at the park, starting to cramp, is this it?

I remember doing this with Trombone, too, in the heat of futzy sleep stuff with him, when he took 45 minutes of rocking and nursing and jiggling to get to sleep I would often sit / stand / rock in the dark with my eyes closed and go through each detail leading up to his birth, telling myself the story and marveling at the miracle of his being there at all.

I began to think I was becoming obsessive but like the sleep futziness, eventually I had turned it over in my head enough to let it go, put it in the “distant but still clear” memories file in my head, out of the “feels like yesterday” memories file.

I am lucky to have had relatively easy labours and I feel peace when I reflect on them. Would I feel differently if I had endured longer, harder (in many senses of the word) labours? Maybe. But I think it’s also a brilliant technique that evolution-brain has developed to calm the tortured mother’s soul. Is it a coincidence that I am coming back to this method of focusing on their beauty and my own strength at the same stage of infant development? Well maybe.

It is also as close as I have come to meditation, rocking these babies in the dark.

( Fresco, 5 months older and cuter than a stinkbug in a birthday hat )