I NEVER FEARED strange noises in the night until a few months ago. But now I lie in bed in the dark, trying to sleep, and I can’t, because of my dread. The room is silent, but that silence is notable because I am certain it will soon be shattered.
And yes, soon enough, it begins–something that sounds a little like a muffled boom, followed by another noise resembling the “ping” of a submarine’s radar.
“Is that–” I ask my wife.
“Yes,” she says.
“Should we–”
“No, wait,” she says.
Another muffled boom. Another ping.
We’re both halfway upright now, tense, not sure what to do.
Then comes a new sound: “Bwoooooaaahhh . . .”
And now we know. We know it’s happened.
The baby is astir. Not awake. But astir.
It’s the middle of the night, and in her room down the hall from ours, our daughter is unsettled. The muffled boom we hear is the sound her legs make when she lets them go after she’s pulled them to her chest. The ping is just the baby vocalizing. The “Bwooooaaaah” is the baby being incredibly cute.
The thing is, we would never hear these noises were it not for the small machine that sits on our windowsill. They call it a “baby monitor,” because it’s a one-way transmitter that lets us hear what’s going on in our daughter’s room. But it really should be called a Parental Torture Instrument.
“I’ll go,” I say.
“No, I’ll go,” my wife says.
“No, let me.”
“Put the pacifier in,” she says.
“Yeah, I know.”
“And,” my wife says, “bring her to me if she’s hungry.”
So I rise, grab my glasses, wind myself in a robe, and shuffle toward the baby’s room. As I approach, I note that I can barely hear her. But on the baby monitor, she is as loud as Ethel Merman.
For you see, what the monitor does is this: It amplifies the sounds the baby makes, so that her noises come across louder and more distinctly than they would if we were two or three feet away from her crib. According to his biographer Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby became the first great pop recording star because he was the first singer to learn how to use the microphone. When it comes to grabbing our attention at 2:30 in the morning, our sleeping daughter is the Bing Crosby of the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
I have, gingerly, suggested to my wife that we might consider turning the volume down on the monitor so that we hear only the really loud wails, the strong screams that would indicate genuine need.
This suggestion was, to put it mildly, dismissed with extreme prejudice.
The monitor sits on a table next to the baby’s crib. As I stand over it, I can see my baby. She is asleep, but restless. She’s whimpering, but there are no tears. This must be a nightmare. But what on earth can she be having a nightmare about? What negative life material could she be using? In her four months on this earth, she has suffered a bit from gas pain and has had a few shots. Other than that, her life has been pretty peachy, and she smiles through the day unless she’s hungry or exhausted.
I remember my sister once saying she would wake her first child up whenever she thought he was having a nightmare because she didn’t want him to have bad dreams. I thought she was nuts at the time, but now I understand. It’s heart-wrenching to watch a four-month-old look as though she’s miserable.
She kicks up her legs again and bangs them down on the mattress. Since we now lay babies to sleep on their backs, they don’t have much ability to comfort themselves with their own bodies. I realize with rue that she is trying, unsuccessfully, to get herself into the fetal position–that she wants to curl up but can’t.
I can sympathize. The baby monitor’s megaphone-like intrusion into my bedroom means that these days sleep isn’t what Shakespeare called tired nature’s sweet restorer. My raveled sleeve of care isn’t getting knitted up the way it used to. I understand that infants disturb your sleep, but does the disturbance have to come via broadcast?
I keep putting the pacifier in my daughter’s mouth, saying shhhh and rubbing her tummy. She pings and mews and scrunches up her face and whimpers. She spits out the pacifier. She opens her mouth wide and wails.
My wife appears in the doorway. “She’s hungry,” I say.
“I know,” she says.
Alas, the baby monitor has won. I am defeated. The baby needed us. We responded. It worked. My indignation lessens. And then, I get to go back to bed while my wife stays up with the baby. It isn’t fair, I know. But then, life isn’t fair.
–John Podhoretz
