When I got pregnant, I knew immediately that I wanted to “have it all,” i.e., minimal weight gain, a natural birth and a baby who slept through the night without me having to do anything. I failed on all three counts.
Well, sorta. At first, my baby did sleep through the night. Curious coworkers asked how sleepless my husband and I were those first few weeks, and I answered with exhaustion that she seemed to only wake up once a night and not till like, 5 a.m., and that we got her back to sleep right away.
“Wow, I hate you,” they said with complete seriousness, and I beamed with pride. Without doing anything at all special my husband and I had produced the kind of baby that inspired hatred! Cross that off the old life list! But more importantly, we were the lucky recipients of that vaunted, mythical unicorn of newborns, so we were told: the easy baby.
The easy baby! Could it be ours!? Our baby would laugh, chill out, and accompany us on long airplane fights to Barcelona, sit through boring DMV visits and enjoy Seinfeld reruns? We would ease into this parenting thing and take our time acclimating thanks to our unbelievable luck and copious amounts of sleep.
Then after a few weeks on maternity leave, I went back out into the world and began noticing other babies. In restaurants, at grocery stores, in parks and at doctor visits. And they weren’t like my baby at all.
While my baby was super adorable but had to be talked to, fed, held and paid attention to most of the time, other babies did things like sit in their carriers mesmerized by a mobile. They were occupied for an entire half hour by a piece of string; they could nap in a bustling café, sleep through a loud movie and seemed content to just hang out in their bucket seat on the floor looking at their mothers’ calves.
As far as I could tell, the mothers of those babies could get up and walk away from the kid, go have a martini down the street, come back an hour later and their baby would probably be sitting there doing a crossword puzzle. My baby got upset because she could tell I was just thinking about having a martini by myself.
Maybe I hadn’t had a baby, but a cocker spaniel. Not so much for the grooming needs, but more in the hyperactive, separation anxiety sense. She protested a lot, wanted to be held all the time, yet hated to be restrained by wrap, car seat or stroller. Not only did she never actually just sit around zoning out like other babies, it was also pretty obvious she thought Seinfeld was bullshit. And the DMV? Forget about it. But still, she slept through the night! Most of the time! For a few weeks! Didn’t that count for anything? Then she stopped doing that, too.
“Easy,” like “pretty” or “fun” or “interesting” or “intelligent,” is obviously an extremely relative term. One person’s good timez is another person’s signal to pop the cyanide capsule. Likewise, venture into the minefield of Internet forums about baby maintenance and you will find every variation of this allegedly “easy” baby.
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