How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane (12 page)

Luckily, it's not up to him—and so we embark on “Operation For-the-Love-of-God-Go-to-Sleep.”

On the first night, forty-five seconds after she begins to cry, the husband pushes past me, picks up the child, and hugs her to his chest, glaring at me as if I'm some sort of crazed dolphin killer. He tells me I must have read the book wrong and implies that I have done permanent damage to the child.

Several days of sleeplessness later, he breaks down and is ready to try again. This time he makes it to the three-minute mark before aggressively shoving me out of the way and rescuing the crying baby.

A week later, with a level of exhaustion that I've never known (something akin to what I'm guessing the Sherpas of Everest must experience), we give it one more go. This time I banish the husband to our bedroom with a pair of noise-canceling headphones and a DVD of
The Matrix
(parts 1, 2, and 3) and tell him, “No matter what you hear beyond these walls, do not open this door.” Torn between his principles and a not-so-secret obsession with Carrie-Ann Moss, he reluctantly agrees and shuts the door behind him. I consider padlocking him inside but decide that's probably a little extreme. Also, we don't have any padlocks.

I lay the baby down in her crib, close the door, and then set the timer on my phone for five minutes. Right on cue, she begins to cry.

You just don't realize the absolute power of your baby's cry until you willfully ignore it. Nature knew what it was doing when it picked that particular combination of sounds (pathetic, indignant, and loud) that tug at something deep within me, somewhere between my cervix and my spleen.

It's hard to take, especially knowing that the immediate remedy for the sound coming out of her would be for me to just go in there and pick her up. But our long-term sanity, her health and welfare, and the integrity of her soft little delete key—not to mention the intensity of my need to be right all the time—all of it depends on this plan working.

I make a pact with myself that, whatever happens, I will be strong. And instead of merely blocking out the sound of her cries, I take a Zen approach and listen intently, really hearing her. It is then that I become aware of how impressively varied and expressive her cries are.

What follows is an approximate translation of those first five minutes:

Finally, the five-minute timer goes off with an
AWOOOOOGAH
! (because yes, I am the person who uses the old-timey car horn as my ring tone).

I open the door and stick my head into her room. She stops midcry, standing in her crib, red-faced and startled, as though I've just caught her shoplifting. I say the thing that I'm supposed to say, to the effect of “Hi sweetie, Mommy's here, everything's okay. Nighty-night.” And then I step out and close the door behind me.

Now she is
pissed
. She has very clearly picked up on the fact that she is being manipulated, and she is so very NOT down with it. She continues screaming, though now she has added a new sound into the mix, an indignant, growly screech that would be perfect if she were the lead singer of an '80s death-metal band. Which, to my knowledge, she is not.

The next ten minutes are endless and pass with all the ease of a Pap-smear exam. I pace around the hallway, listening to her shrieks and trying hard to remember if
The Exorcist
was based on factual source material.

At the ten-minute mark—
AWOOOOOGAH
!—I open the door to her room. Her face is moist with tears and
sweat; she's angry and exhausted. I know that face; I've seen it in the mirror a thousand times, on the heels of a thousand rage-filled disappointments.

I step into the room and say some more soothing words; I set the timer on my phone, and again I close the door. I consider yanking the husband out of his Carrie-Anne Moss–filled cocoon so that I can get some moral support—but no. I will do this alone. And once it's over, I will gloat about having done so.

And then something miraculous happens. Within a few minutes her cries taper off and transition to deep, snore-y breaths. She is actually falling asleep.

But just as her breaths grow slower and longer, an insistent new sound erupts, this one from the house next door. I sprint on tiptoes to the bathroom and peek through the blinds, through which I can see the neighbor, not five feet away, inside her house, busily vacuuming the wall.

I can't quite process what I'm seeing. It's eight o'clock at night. And the sound is so loud, it seems she's vacuuming marbles out of her drapes. WHY ARE THERE MARBLES IN HER DRAPES?! I knock on the window, but of course she can't hear through the G.D. marbles . . .

If a baby's cry is the most powerful sound in all of humanity, then the second most powerful sound is me whisper-yelling through two panes of glass, “IF YOU DON'T TURN OFF THAT VACUUM CLEANER, THEN I AM COMING TO YOUR HOUSE WITH AN ARMLOAD OF DIRTY DIAPERS AND I'M LEAVING EMPTY-HANDED!!”
^*

Perhaps she heard me—or perhaps she didn't hear me and it was just the specter of my psychotic, snarling face through the blinds, looking like some sort of deranged toilet demon . . . Whatever it was, it worked. The vacuum cleaner gets switched off.

I listen at the child's door; miraculously (and luckily for our marble-sucking neighbor), it appears she is still sleeping.

I turn to check the timer on my phone—then realize I don't have my phone.

My phone.

I have left my phone in the baby's room. With the timer running. The timer that will count down to zero and then end with the blaring horn of a 1923 Packard.

I have to get it out of there in the next . . . I'm not sure—I started it at fifteen minutes, maybe we're at six minutes now? . . . without waking her. This will be tricky.

With incredible precision (of an order that would put Carrie-Ann Moss to shame), I enter the child's room using the slow, silent, walking-against-the-wind skills I honed back when I was a professional mime.
^*
I can hear the gentle
shhnooooccchh
of her sleepy breaths. I can see, too, the light of my phone on the changing table where I'd set it down without thinking.

As I grab the phone and switch off the timer, the child stirs and turns over. I dive onto the shaggy throw rug where I refrain from moving until I am certain she is still asleep.

Lying on the floor, I am surprised at how comfortable I am; that mime bit really took it out of me—it may have been the most actual exercise I've done all year. The child's overpriced tea-towel-size crib blanket has fallen onto the floor, so I pull it over me (over one-quarter of my torso, anyway), and I begin to drift off to sleep—which doesn't seem like the worst idea I've had today, so . . .

What the hell. I let it happen.

I am awakened. By my bladder. I have to pee, urgently and with the intensity of a blocked fire hose. I can tolerate sleeping on my face next to an overflowing diaper pail on carpet that hasn't been vacuumed in two years, but I draw the line at lying in my own urine. I would try peeing into (onto? at?) one of the baby's ultra-absorbent diapers, but the fresh ones are out of arm's reach.

I have to get out of here. But the hallway light that would have lit my escape route is no longer on. The husband must have turned it off, the thoughtful bastard, and now I find myself in a pitch-black abyss.

I begin to feel my way across the toy-strewn floor, crawling on my belly toward the door, when my knee hits something. I cast my eye downward and see a small multicolored ray of light begin to flash. And then . . .

“TWIN-KLE TWIN-KLE! LITTLE STA-AAR! HOW I WON-DER WHA-AAA—”

It's that goddamn singing drum! I throw myself on top of it, hoping that my muffin-top flab will stifle the sound while I search frantically for the off switch. Why must
every toy sing? And always in the same voice, some wannabe country star who sings every song with far too much sincerity and earnestness and ohmygod I'm gonna fly to Nashville and find her so I can rip out her vocal chords and make sure she never sings another G.D. note!

The toy stops its squeal-singing . . . and then switches abruptly to singing in Spanish (still the same woman, Ay Dios Mio)! I claw at the toy, locate the power switch again, this time turning it OFF.

The crib springs creak as the kid's 20-pound frame bolts upright.

I can see the whites of her enormous eyes glinting in the darkness.

“Mmmuh? Mmmuh?”

I slide the tiny blanket over my face and hold my breath.

She's looking in my direction—but I don't think she's actually seeing me. Maybe she's not quite awake yet, or perhaps her eyes have not adjusted to the dark, or maybe it's that she's six months old and for all she knows it's totally normal for floors to suddenly grow 125-pound lumps in them.
^*
†

I'm not sure what to do if she starts to cry. The pamphlet didn't say anything about how to handle being caught in the act; if I reveal myself to her, will she be confused or alarmed? Or will she simply come to believe that her parents are always with her, hiding under her bed?
^‡

I stay where I am, frozen in space and time, my full-to-bursting bladder pressing against my corneas. All I can do is lay here with my thoughts, most of which involve rushing water.

The child begins to babble to herself. Normally, I love the sound of her nonsense talking—when she does it, I like to imagine that she's addressing Congress—but now I'm terrified that her thoughts on the Health Care Bill will transform into wails.

Thankfully, this doesn't happen. Instead, she lies down, her babbling softening until it is just soft, whispery breaths. After I am certain that she is asleep, I get up off the floor and sneak out. And just as I am about to shut her bedroom door, I find myself face-to-face with the husband, who is now en route to the toilet.

“IS SHE OUT?” he croaks loudly.

If I could think of a way to throttle the life out of him in total silence, I would. Unfortunately, I am not a martial arts expert,
^*
so instead I push past him to the bathroom, where I release my bodily fluids, as slowly and quietly as I can.