Sleep When the Baby Sleeps

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sunlight sunflowers, a moment of calm before we begin

A while ago, the wonderful Lunate fiction asked if I would contribute a piece to a proposed one-off journal on parenthood, with profits to go to Medical Aid for Palestinians. Sadly, the journal never came to pass, but I had a story on my hands, “Sleep When the Baby Sleeps” and a burning wish to use it to its intended purpose, raising money to help those suffering in the ongoing genocide. I’ve decided to publish the piece here with the hope of using this tiny platform to do just that.

There is no obligation to read. We are all short on time, and I am not here to make this about my writing, and neither am I likely to ever self publish a piece again - the most important thing is if you can, please send a donation to MAP through the link above. Here it is again in case that prompts you better. Or if you have a prefered way of supporting the Palestinian people, whether through charity or supporting individuals, and if you are at all able, please consider doing so. I’d love it if you let me know in the comments here if you do, and how you went about it. Sharing this is also good, though perhaps just share the link to MAP, for ease of whoever receives it.

And just if you have time, the story, which tackles post-natal psychosis, follows

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Sleep When the Baby Sleeps

Baby was bathed and dried. New nappy on. The parent climbed onto the bed, and got into position, dimming the light to red. Red was supposed to be healing, somehow. Good on the frazzled eyes. Parent put in the headphones with one awkward hand while cradling baby’s head, and started listening to an audiobook of something she would forget the moment it was finished. The baby latched, began the feed. 

Then, at some point night baby came.

Parent never saw who delivered night baby, or remembered how it was done. She supposed it must have been a quick, smooth handover each time. She would simply look down, and there, it was a different baby, and night shift was underway. When she had realised there must be a night baby was hard to tell. The days and nights were smeared into one another, ever since that first night in the ward, in the bed next to the screaming baby and the weeping carer, opposite the patient in recovery from a caesarean that wasn’t taking well. She herself had been calm. But baby, her baby, had not slept easy that first night, despite not crying either. He had watched her with his dark, newborn eyes, uncannily focused, and she had watched him, and each of them posing the question, who are you, kind stranger? And is this love, and what is my body, separate from you? Old questions, never fully answered.

“How’s mum?” asked Home Visitor, muffled by her mask. Parent looked at her; she looked overworked, and bored, and knew that to save them both the embarrassment and paperwork, there could only be one answer to this.

“Fine! A little tired,” she said as clearly as she could, from behind her own mask.

“Oh that’s normal. Sleep when the baby sleeps, don’t be too precious about getting your head down,” said Home Visitor, scrunching up her eyes to show she was smiling.

“Of course,” parent had said. Mum and baby both doing well. Tick.

At some point it had snowed; parent had not been out of the house in a month. Other parent had, but only to get food. So much sickness all around. Babies dying from it. Parents getting sick and trying to birth in masks. She had been lucky, missed both covid and labouring while masked. She tried to answer emails from work. She stared at the windblown portion of street outside, longing for visitors and fearing them too.

You are supposed to feel tired as a new parent. You are supposed to get snatches of shuteye. Sleep when baby sleeps. Multitask while you hold them in a carrier. Skin time. Bask in these days, they will never come again. But if baby barely sleeps for half an hour at a time, if baby squirms in the carrier, wants to see your face or to drink milk, and you need to make hot food stovetop spitting and you need to clean, and all the exhaustion makes it harder to fall asleep, what then, you put your head down on the pillow, wait, close your eyes – and flash, the crying has begun again? What then? Then you try to understand: why is it not like how it is for other parents? And the answer comes: because you don’t have just one baby, but two. It is a special arrangement, and a solemn duty.

On the bed, parent stared down at night baby. Night baby sucked, and looked at her with eyes strangely similar to the real one. Parent thought, you’re not mine, but I shall always do my best for you. I won’t let you go hungry. Then she’d wonder, where does the baby go when I hand it over? She could never remember the handbacks either, these happened some time around the dawn, when she would wake from half-sleep, disentangle herself from the headphones and see her own little one, asleep peacefully. As soon as she stirred he would wake and look at her. She supposed he could speak, in his own head.

“Where do you go, baby?” she would ask silently. And he would reply,

“That is not for me or you to know.”

Parent read an article about baby sleep. It told her, babies can usually sleep through the night after a few months. A second article said, after a year. A third said, some children sleep well at night from age four. This article she tried to hold at arms length to keep herself from the radioactive poison of it. On the worst nights, she would find herself watching night baby’s chest rising and falling and think, distantly, if you die, if you stop breathing, how will I mourn you? How could I come to your funeral? I don’t even know where you live. But in the morning, the night baby would be gone, and baby would cry heartily and she would feed him again and the day would stretch out, shapeless, crackled, full of empty routines and glimmers of love. With other parent, there could be moments of pressing their heads together and saying, this too will pass. But it did not pass. Night baby kept being delivered. Eventually though, they tried to put baby to sleep in his own cot, though he seemed to hate it, crying with a terrible loneliness. Parent slept with her head beside it and her fingers through the bars, but then she would wake thinking that baby was tangled in her bed sheets, suffocating. In the dark she would fumble about, then sit up and stare down at him. Breathing check. Her own chest thumping. Her chest with its ache of milk. It’s nothing, she would tell herself. The tears came down like milk, washing away the hunger in her, a hunger she did not know the end of. She called these different visitations, ghost babies. These were what you got when night baby could not be handed over. Other parent had them too, waking with a jolt and looking, pulling, trying to get baby to safety, when baby was simply lying in the cot, looking at them. He had a sleep sack on now, and his toes would find the little flap at the bottom of it and poke through, waving.

Baby passed the age when SIDS risk diminishes. He was alive. He still woke eight times, nine times a night. He did not cry much but grizzled and called. He still looked at her with the intensity of someone who has lived, who understands. Even Health Visitor and Vaccination Nurse noticed and commented, a strange edge to their tone which parent tried dimly to parse. Nothing about thoughts was easy now, but her body made its necessary circuits within and outwith to keep baby going, and herself, barely. Other parent brought what they could carry. Baby began to cruise around the furniture, then walk. He did not laugh much, or clap, or wave. It was as if he knew how serious life was. Parent thought, later, that it was down to his time away at night, when he went to the place where night baby was from. The otherworld. It had given him certain insights, and in turn it had taken that certain light formlessness from him that other babies had. He was of an age where he began to speak, and quicker than the articles ruled was speaking in full sentences. He spoke of himself in the second person. He called her mama, though she had never taught him that. He wanted to know what everything was. He wanted to refuse, to define, to explore. He still did not sleep through the night.

One day she was reading him a book and began to cry, as quietly as she could. The long exile from rest just made the body leak sometimes. He turned and looked at her, patted her hand.

“Mama” he said, “you do it well. I love you.”

Suddenly, she thought of all those long, long nights, and terror of them, and all at once the love came up over her, over them both as she held him, in a great, cool, cleansing cresting wave.