In the Sweet Night

As luck would have it, our baby granddaughter’s mama is getting some medical issues attended to and so we are filling in or stepping up or doing that which there is no choice but to do gracefully.

I spent my first night in forty-eight years waiting for the cry that would stop sleeping and trigger bottle making and warming. While I have four children, I had only one true infant. The others came later – two as toddlers in weakened conditions and one as a nearly seven-year old who not only slept through the night but was adamant about the proper way to brush one’s teeth. Orphanages can be pretty specific about those kind of things.

I was better getting through the night than I thought I’d be. It helps that we moved the crib between our bed and the big windows facing the street and catching the light of the moon. The night glittering of Lake Michigan can be felt, not seen, giving a lace to the light that is lovely and impossible to describe. The sum is that the person seeing all this feels lucky to be awake in the still of the night.

Perhaps lucky isn’t the right word. Maybe ‘not unappreciative’ is more accurate.

The baby was swaddled in a wrap that said “Back is Best.” I learned about swaddling when my twin grandsons were babies eight years ago and I’d gotten myself tangled in strands of Velcro trying to ready them for bed. Now, I am an old hand. I know how to swaddle and how to lay a baby on her back in the middle of an unadorned crib mattress. Never mind I was told so long ago to put my baby on her stomach and make sure she didn’t get cold. That was then.

Last night, when this new granddaughter woke, it was with intent. She wanted food and changing and someone to pat her on the back and then wind her up tight in her swaddle to go back to sleep. I did those things and, although I’d very much prefer not to, wishing instead she was with her mother, it was greatly satisfying to me.

I may be old but I remembered how. The nights when I was twenty-four and worried that I didn’t know what I was doing came back to me not as remembered panic but as precious knowledge. I know how to do this, I thought, and all will be well.