I have a confession: Even though I’m a mother of two, I fear holding other people’s babies.
I think the fear stems from a day in sixth grade when I accidentally dropped my friend Christy Hahn’s new flute. It was a silver-plated, open-hole Gemeinhardt (which is pretty fancy in case you don’t know your flutes) and we were standing on the vast blacktop peering into the open case held in Christy’s hands. For some reason, I wanted to hold the flute. She said OK, so I lifted the three silver pieces from their velvet homes and put them together.
Then I instantly fumbled and dropped the flute. I don’t know how it happened. No one bumped into me. My hands were dry and clean. There was really no excuse. I’m just clumsy, and I dropped her flute onto the asphalt and the mouthpiece was dented.
I can’t recall exactly what happened after that. She was distraught. Her father was angry. Her flute got fixed. I may have given her money, but I’m not sure. I know I apologized profusely. We remained friends.
You might wonder how this flute relates in any way to a baby, but in my mind they are interconnected. I was so confident that day in sixth grade, lifting that new, perfect flute into my hands without a care in the world. And look what happened. It made me not trust myself as I once had. And that lack of trust persists, despite having held my own two babies constantly with never a glitch or slip.
I thought I would get over it after holding my own infants, but even now, a newborn makes me nervous and I prefer to smile down at the child without actually holding it in my arms.
Holding a newborn takes a certain amount of confidence, but caring for one takes even more. You can read all the baby books and ask mothers and fathers all kinds of questions in order to prepare yourself, but the wisdom you gain from books and advice never ever feels like enough or exactly the right information you need when your baby is wailing or won’t sleep or latch on or eat.
For example, you can be told to let your infant cry in his crib, then come in and reassure him, then leave again and repeat until your child falls asleep. This is called sleep training, and when you read about how to do it, it sounds like a piece of cake. But many of you readers know that it is not easy at all.
The book never tells you how your baby’s cry will pierce your heart, how coming in and offering reassurance – without picking the baby up! – won’t work at all and that your baby will just wail more fiercely as you turn and walk away. The book won’t tell you how long it will take or how many times you will give up your resolve and just pick your baby up and hold him close, willing him to stop crying no matter what. The book won’t tell you how you’ll question everything in that moment: the wisdom of sleep training, the need for sleep in general, the notion that you could be a mother. Everything.
But what the book also doesn’t tell you is how, when you get something right, you will feel as if you had won the Pulitzer Prize. When you hold your sleeping infant in your arms, secure that her belly is full and she is happy, you will understand that she trusts you more in that moment than anyone has ever trusted you before.
Her trust isn’t something she can form into words. It’s not an idea she even knows, but it is there. You can see it in her sleeping face, feel it in the way her body loosens in your arms into deep, unworried slumber. And in that moment, you’re not scared about dropping her, you’re just unbelievably pleased with your good fortune.
