Sandi Kahn Shelton - Sleeping Through the Night

So YOU DID IT. YOU WENT AND MADE YOURSELVES A BABY.

By now youve probably figured out how it happened. Oh sure, there was the sex. But youd done that before without any babies getting started. This time, though, something mysterious and huge happenedegg and sperm actually introduced themselves to each other, shook hands, and then moved in togetherand somehow all your vague ideas of someday have turned into right now.

Welcome to the Parent Club.

Perhaps you were sick of people saying, So when are you guys going to have a kid, anyway? Or maybe you suddenly noticed that when you were out in public, you could barely pay attention to what anybody was saying because you were so busy gazing at strangers red-cheeked toddlers dozing in their strollers. And you couldnt help it; youd stare at the parents, checking them out for signs of premature wear and tear, and find yourself relieved if it seemed they were still able to walk upright.

Or maybeand this happens more than youd thinkpregnancy just sort of started on its own, as though the baby itself issued a policy statement: Attention, People I Have Chosen As Parents: I have waited in the World of Ideas for just about as long as I can stand. I will now be making an appearance on earth in approximately nine months. PS. I can make do with your spare room, but youll have to get all that junk out of there. And by the way, we up here in the World of Ideas found it very amusing that you thought that diaphragm didnt have any holes in it.

However it happened, one day your time of childlessness simply ran out, and here you are: a couple with a kid.

On the one hand, youve probably realized that if the two of you can survive pregnancy and everyones horror stories about childbirth, you can probably survive anything, even parenthood.

But then theres the other hand, that voice in your ear thats always too happy to remind you how incompetent youve always been in life. Its there to remind you how badly you did, in fact, with that stupid parenthood experiment in junior high, where you had to carry around a raw egg for a week without letting it dropand how you went through ten eggs before you finally got the idea of hard-boiling the thing so it could survive to be two weeks old.

By now its occurred to you that if you try to hard-boil the baby, the authorities will come. And that besides feeding it and keeping it moderately clean, theres not an equivalent thing you can do for a baby to make sure it lives. Or doesnt get hurt. Or makes it through seventh grade unscathed. Or even learns how to roll over.

To make matters worse, it seems that everywhere you turn, some expert or other is announcing that the first three years of life are so wildly important that a persons whole life, future earnings, and chances of going to the senior prom are all set in place during the precise time period when you, as parents, are as freaked out as youve ever been in your life. Theres this nagging little feeling, supported, Im afraid, by everyone from your parents to the federal government and the National Institutes of Health, that you could really Get It Wrong and screw up the next generation royally. You, in fact, and your buddies who also may someday start procreating, could be personally responsible for the downfall of Western Civilization. Thanks to the way youve been living your life and are likely to be raising your child, human beings will most likely forget how to walk erect and simply turn into blobs, on their way, evolution-wise, toward being sea dwellers again.

But heres the truth: No one has ever felt remotely mentally healthy enough to raise a kid, and everybody gets it wrong every day. And even though the first three years are hair-raising and, yes, also extremely important, chances are your sense of goodwillthe same sense of goodwill that got you your life and your jobs and each othercan get you through. Remember this: Nobodynot even the head of the National Institute of Pediatric Health and Baby Management, if there were such a thing knows what the hell to do when its the middle of the night, and the kid is screaming and youve tried feeding, youve tried burping, youve tried walking, and youve tried changing diapers. Youve even turned on the stereo, turned up the thermostat, turned down the thermostat, invented forty more verses to I Found a Peanut, and now youre ready to consider alcoholic beverages all around, only the kid isnt twenty-one yet, and youre sure youll get arrested.

Here are the crazy things people will tell you, and they are all true:

Sometimes turning on the clothes dryer works.

Sometimes walking very fast while singing the words to your high school fight song works.

Sometimes wrapping the babys feet in a blanket helps.

Sometimes not eating garlic for a while will prevent other incidents like that, but probably not retroactively for this time.