Illo by Thomas Pitilli.

Sleeping through the night doesn’t seem like such a hard task. Not to brag, but I used to do it all the time. One minute I would be struggling to decode a Will Shortz pun, the next minute: Sunlight! Garbage trucks! Some asshole honking! A new day dawned.

My son, Sam, however, does not seem to have gotten the memo. Not only does he not sleep through the night, he is almost no help at all with the Times crossword. Unless the clue is “One who can’t be pacified,” say.

It’s funny how much sleep obsesses new parents.

All we ever want to know is who’s getting it, how often, and how deep. How long does it last, we ask breathlessly over cocktails. Twenty minutes? Three hours? Six? Sleep has become to our 30s what sex was to our 20s: We still talk about it much more often than we do it, and our roommates present a considerable obstacle.

The first question my husband and I had to answer as new parents was: Where will the baby sleep? We got something called an Arm’s Reach Co-Sleeper, which is like a mini-crib designed to attach to the side of an adult bed. But our baby did not like the co-sleeper, perhaps because its “mattress” was essentially a sheet of corrugated cardboard (for safety reasons, babies are only allowed to sleep on surfaces that cannot possibly suffocate them, such as parquet flooring and chain-link fences). The average prison cot is cozier than a crib mattress, but babies must endure, swaddled in their cute little straightjackets meant to approximate the uterine wall’s viselike embrace.

When the co-sleeper didn’t work, we started putting our son in a cheerful yellow bassinet that we dragged with us from room to room. But he didn’t like that either, and getting him to doze in it required first rocking him to sleep on our bodies and then transferring him into the new vessel, a task we approached with the anxious care of two people playing Jenga with sticks of dynamite.

Now he sleeps in our bed most of the time. Even if you’re not a hippie, “family bed” sounds cozy, right? Big Love by way of Sesame Street? Wrong. I get kicked in the face, my husband sleeps at the foot of the bed like a Labrador, and Sam’s hair bears the unmistakable scent of armpit. It smells like defeat.

People kept telling us he would sleep better at six weeks. Or 10 pounds. Whichever came first. When he started eating solids, or sleeping on his stomach. People told us to follow the “Five S’s,” a mnemonic made famous by Harvey Karp, a bestselling author and Dr. Phil staple known as “the baby whisperer.” But I still can’t remember what the S’s stand for, as in our house they devolved quickly into “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” Our baby would not sleep—at least, not well. Night after night, I imagined what Sisyphus must have felt like, had he been pushing a Bugaboo instead of a boulder. Or if the boulder had been screaming. Or if his punishment had included listening to Led Zeppelin songs played on the glockenspiel.

“Oh, getting him to sleep is really simple,” our pediatrician told us when we saw her for Sam’s three-month visit. We leaned in like junkies eager for a fix. “You just put him in the crib, close the door, and don’t go in until the next morning.” Readers who are parents will notice that there’s a crucial ellipsis hidden in her advice. Let’s revisit: You just put him in the crib (seems easy enough), close the door (hand-eye coordination challenge, but O.K.) ... baby cries for forty-fucking-five minutes while you weep into your vodka (there’s the rub!) ... and don’t go in until the next morning. Full disclosure: I only know about this ellipsis through the experience of friends. I was unwilling to let him cry. The one time we tried it, just for a few minutes, he gagged on his own wracking sobs and projectile-vomited. Back to the wakeful family bed we went.

There are countless books and patented methods out there promising to get babies to sleep through the night, but most people opt for one of two: some variation on the “cry-it-out” approach (see above re: tears and booze) or total denial and avoidance, and the hope that the baby will start sleeping like a second-semester college senior without parental intervention.

Cry-it-out, of course, like all parenting choices these days, is divisive. Lots of people swear by it, trading a few nights of misery for a lifetime of peaceful slumber, but attachment parents demonize it as emotionally harmful to children, citing articles by psychologists who argue that babies stop crying and fall into deep sleep not because they learn to self-soothe but because they become despondent and apathetic, convinced that they’ve been abandoned. These studies always claim that babies left to cry carry emotional problems with them throughout their lives.

On the flip side, a lot of people assume that by letting Sam sleep next to me and comforting him whenever he stirs will turn him into some kind of cross between Oedipus and Norman Bates. But I don’t buy any of it, just like I can’t really accept astrology’s dubious claim that all people born under the one sign can be described with the same set of adjectives. (Then again, I’m an Aries.)

We’ve had our victories, however small, like the two instances during which Sam slept for eight hours in his own crib immediately after we watched Ryan Gosling movies on Netflix. It seemed like a harbinger of happy slumber, but then Blue Valentine broke our streak. I think he found it too depressing. Maybe we’ll have better luck with The Notebook.

editorial@observer.com

Can you have it all?

I don’t think anyone would mistake me for Marissa Mayer—the newly-appointed 37-year-old CEO of Yahoo who’s raising hackles all over town with her very public promise to return to work two weeks after delivering her first baby. For one thing, I am not a blonde (it wouldn’t be a good look for me, seeing as I am the approximate color of tracing paper and hirsute enough that old Russian women speak to me on the subway in their native tongue). Also, no one has ever wanted to make me the CEO of anything, ever. I think it has something to do with the fact that when you run my credit score, instead of a number, you get a slot machine tableau in which three skulls-and-crossbones roll into a line and then start laughing hysterically. But I digress.

I’m also unlike Mayer in that I didn’t publicly vow to return to work after two weeks. Or six weeks. Or even three months. Instead, once I’d used up most of my maternity leave, I asked for more time to stay home with my baby, and I got it. And then my editor and I decided that it would be mutually beneficial for me to start this column instead of returning to my former post as managing editor. The truth is, I didn’t want to go back to a full-time job. I wanted to freelance and stay home—to be, in the acronymic shorthand of mommy bloggers, a WAHM, or work-at-home mom. It may sound like a dyslexic George Michael cover band, but it’s my choice, and so far I’m happy with it.

The question of whether to return to the office after having babies—another cultural Seussian Butter Battle that rages on with no détente in sight—has been around as long as women have been in the work force, and it’s come to the fore again lately, with Mayer’s public vow to continue to work through her (very short) maternity leave arriving on the spiked heels of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s controversial Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” If Slaughter’s thesis—that a high-powered career can only come with at least some cost to your children’s emotional needs—seemed depressing, Mayer’s appointment should have been an uplifting, knocked-up Cinderella story of a retort. After all, look! It’s a pregnant woman—fecund and famished and and chock full of crazy hormones—running a Fortune 500 company! She can have her baby and leave it with a nanny, too! If she doesn’t have it all, then who does?

Mayer’s hiring is unquestionably good news for women looking to climb the corporate ladder. But her eschewing anything approaching a reasonable maternity leave doesn’t set a great precedent. It seems to suggest that recovering from childbirth is some sort of vacation—an indulgent postpartum Shangri-La of beatific repose and the triumphant consumption of alcohol, sushi and other luxury items on the pregnancy prohibition list—that ambitious women really should be able to go without. I wish we lived in a society where it was as acceptable for a high-powered career woman to take a full three-month maternity leave without apology as it is for a high-powered career man to spend the entire month of August on golf courses in the Hamptons.

Most women I know—who are of course not nearly as high-profile as Mayer—already feel pressure to bounce back, as if they’d had all that time “off” to simply rest and recuperate. But anyone who’s had a baby knows that time spent with a newborn is not time off. It’s not like say, getting a gallbladder or appendix removed (I’ve never had either surgery, but from my understanding, neither organ is capable of screaming in the night, demanding to be fed, once it leaves the body). Instead, it’s a sink-or-swim period of training in which you are forced to be “on” all the time—a 24-hour nanny, personal chef, chauffeur, maid, court jester, teacher, tour guide, body guard, punching bag and feedlot to a miniature boss who, if left to his own devices, would surely perish, or at least urinate unwittingly on his own face.

That’s maternity leave in practice. In theory, it should serve the dual purpose of allowing a mother to heal after the decidedly taxing exercise of labor, while also giving her time to bond with her baby and catch up on her DVR queue while she waits for her nipples to stop leaking. The catch is that no one knows exactly how much time should be allotted for these activities, so governments decide ... and as with erectile dysfunction medication, results may vary.

In Austria, to use an extreme example, new parents receive a collective two years of paid parental leave. In America, the Family Medical Leave Act entitles new parents to up to 12 weeks without fear of losing their jobs, but none of that time is legally required to be compensated. Some companies offer the option for longer leaves—a woman I know who’s a junior associate at a major law firm got six months—but most don’t. (In the interest of full disclosure, I took unpaid FMLA leave from The Observer, and when I didn’t return after 12 weeks, my medical benefits automatically expired.)

I’m inclined to doubt that Yahoo’s official benefits package includes a clause ordering new mothers to fire up their BlackBerrys while waiting for the afterbirth to pass, so Mayer’s decision is probably a personal one, meant to reassure shareholders that she will only take her hands off the wheel for the half day or so it takes her to extrude another human being from her body. More power to her if this is what she truly wants. But I can’t know. Neither will she, until she pops that kid out. That’s why parental leaves are so important—they allow time to adjust to a completely different life, one in which, while  your day job may still be waiting in the wings, you’re busy learning the ropes to a frightening and powerful new position you are probably (mentally, if not biologically) totally unqualified for.

Hell, I’m 10 months in and I still don’t know anything. Except that I wish I lived in Austria. If not for the healthcare, then at least for the pastries.

editorial@observer.com

The general consensus was that no one was having much sex, and no one wanted to, either. Many of the mothers said they could count the number of times they’d had sex postpartum on one hand, and some had 8- and 9-month-old babies. When I came home and reported these stats to my husband, he was elated. We manage to have sex about once a week, which is the new-parent equivalent of constantly.
Not that it’s been easy. No one tells you this, but babies are the world’s biggest cockblock.

The first few times we attempted to rekindle the romance, our son—perhaps sensing the potential biological threat of additional offspring—refused to cooperate. Time after time, we attempted to put him down in his bassinet, only to hear him squeal moments later as we prepared to doff our spit-up-stained sweatpants. Once we finally succeeded, it was a hurried affair, and not as enjoyable for me as I would have liked—not because of any failure on the part of my husband, but because it was impossible for me not to worry that my equipment had been ... well, compromised.

The problem is, once you’ve pushed a baby through an orifice you once reserved for recreational purposes, it’s hard to go back, psychologically speaking. That’s not always a bad thing—I recently needed encouragement to finish a stressful project on deadline, and a friend put her hand on mine and told me, with some very meaningful eye contact, “You gave birth. You can do anything”—but when you’re in the throes of passion and suddenly you find yourself thinking, “A head came out of there!” it kind of puts a damper on the proceedings. I remember my 10th-grade health teacher, Ms. Drvostep, gravely informing the class during a discussion of human sexuality that, at least biologically, the anus was designed as an “out hole.” Maybe that’s my problem. My vagina was an in hole, then it was (briefly, but memorably) an out hole, and now it’s supposed to be an in hole again. It’s having an identity crisis, and it doesn’t help that sometimes, when I’m drying off after a shower, my husband will point at my crotch and exclaim gleefully to our child, “There’s your old house!”

There is also the uncomfortable (double entendre intended) truth that it’s hard to go back, physiologically speaking, even if your doctor gives you the go-ahead after six weeks, which is the standard abstinence period gratefully celebrated by the new mom and ascetically endured by the new dad (the wait time is even longer following caesarean sections). No matter how many kegels—pelvic exercises akin to vaginal bicep curls, for the uninitiated—you do, the fact remains that a fully formed human being weighing around eight pounds came out of an opening previously accustomed to visitors of a smaller girth.

An old Lenny Bruce routine once compared a large penis to a baby’s arm, but add a second arm, two legs, a torso and a head that feels, from the inside, like a bowling ball set on fire, and you have something not at all like a penis. So naturally there is going to be some fallout (no pun intended! none!) from the stretching. No one wants to talk about it, of course. I mean, I’m always seeing tabloid covers crowing about some celebrity or other’s post-baby body, which they presumably achieve through a combination of colonic therapy, macrobiotic diet and virgin sacrifice. But I never see an article about, say, Jessica Alba’s post-baby vagina. And if hers isn’t ready for the pages of Us Weekly, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

It’s a slippery slope even under the best of circumstances, and I’m not speaking literally, as anyone who’s experienced the drying effects of plummeting postpartum estrogen can attest. Even if you do get over the libido-robbing hormone fiesta and the colicky coitus interuptus and manage to retain enviable nether regional muscle tone and semi-regular bedpost-notching, there’s one thing that no amount of personal grooming or mood music can change, and that’s the realization that you’re now somebody’s mother. As such, society now gives you two exciting choices, a special procreative variation on the traditional madonna/whore: either succumb to the high-waisted jeans, sensible earlobe-length haircut, and soccer-friendly SUV of the asexual martyr who lives in a Tide commercial, or get a gym membership, hop on the treadmill, and run like hell for MILF Island. (To be clear, not a real place, although I hear East Hampton is getting close.)

The term MILF itself points up the problem. I’ve always disliked it, and not just because it’s icky and sophomoric, but because it suggests that a mother who’s considered sexually desirable is an endangered species on a par with the Tasmanian Devil or the Giant Panda. I like to think I am at least as sexy as a regular-size panda, on days I’ve managed to shower.

Despite all of the awkwardness and body dysmorphia outlined above, however, I’m happy to report that I still very much enjoy sex when conditions are ideal (baby, asleep; me, awake), and that despite what my sense memory occasionally tells me, no part of my anatomy resembles the Holland Tunnel, even in passing. Post-baby sex can even feel sometimes like the carefree sex of my youth, except that it’s faster and more exhausted—not to be confused with exhaustive—and we can’t make any noise for fear of scarring our sleeping child for life. And we never even consider not using protection in the heat of the moment, because, seriously, look where that got us.

But otherwise, it’s good. Plus there’s the added bonus that I might find a stray Cheerio in my bra. Kinky.
editorial@observer.com