Tonight, after the time of day I call rush hour, (3 hours straight of nursing, feeding, rocking, bouncing, topping off with a bottle and then finally getting the baby to sleep), I found out about Amy Ernst. Apparently we have a mutual friend on facebook– Sarah Fretwell, who is traveling the world on a photography/humanitarian project.
Amy is a guest blogger for Nicholas Kristof, and is currently living in the Congo working with survivors of the war, and in the case of today’s article, even rescuing the survivors from their caretakers. I didn’t want to read the article. I knew better. I knew how it would tear my heart out and wrench my soul. I already know “these things” go on in the world, so most of the time I look away, telling myself, “the best thing I can do right now is raise my girl to be strong and confident.” But sometimes I feel like it is my duty as a woman to know the stories of other mothers – my sisters – indeed it is a part of the legacy of womanhood my daughter has inherited from the world, and I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the inherent challenges my girl may face by mere fact of her gender.
As a mother though, there is a new kind of pain that cuts through the center of my essence when I hear these stories, and so it was with a haunted feeling of both sorrow and longing to bring these babies into my home that I went to bed with tonight. And it was this same ache that led me to her when she awoke in the middle of the night. My girl is a sleeper, and so usually when she wakes up she’ll fall back asleep within a few minutes. In fact the times we pick her up it seems like we disturb her even more by trying to sooth her. But tonight my heart weighed heavy with all the babies in the world for whom no one answers their cries at night…or worse yet – that sometimes someone does come.
As I felt her cries subside and her sniffles mellow while I held her close and rocked her, my own tears came. It wasn’t my usually mental ranting about how twisted the world political systems are, and who are these sick people that hurt babies, that ran through my mind.
It was wordless, and came from an even deeper place that cannot be named – A sorrow bigger than anything that could come from inside myself. It was a black hole of grief for all of the nameless babies that go unloved, discarded, un-soothed, and never get to experience their own innocence. I leaned in and took in a deep breath, and rested my nose on her forehead as we continued to rock. All babies begin with this clean slate. All babies smell like the origin of air and the first dew of spring. All babies should get the opportunity to know love in this world, and why they don’t is something I can’t even grapple with it is so desperately sad to me.
Her breaths deepen now, her arms go limp against my chest, in her safe, fearless world. I suddenly didn’t care about a good nights sleep. Sleep training sounded so meaningless – vapid even. All the online banter about Amy Chua – smoke screens and distractions from what we mommas should really be outraged about. It almost seems staged to me now, it’s so irrelevant. How quintessentially bourgeois American to have so many opinions about sleep-overs and how long piano practice should last. I breathe in her sweet smell one more time and give her a kiss goodnight. Then I hug her close and give her one more kiss in the name of all the babies who didn’t get one tonight.
