TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 164

[Tobie Shapiro]

February 27, 20007


Dear Friends,

	At three in the morning, I woke up and 
heard Meyshe in the next room, laughing 
hysterically and bouncing on his chair.  This 
meant he must be at the computer having a grand 
old time.  I knocked on his door and asked to 
come in.

	"Meyshe!  It's three o'clock in the morning!  What are you doing up?"

	"I couldn't sleep."

	We've all had nights like that.  But I 
didn't expect it in my nearly 20 year old son.  I 
told him he should try to sleep some time.  And 
we decided between us that he shouldn't go to 
school in his condition.  This morning when I got 
up at about quarter to six, I heard him next door 
still laughing and carrying on.  He was up the 
entire night.  Not a minute of sleep.

	The upshot is that I laid out his pills 
for him this morning, minus the Ritalin.  I 
didn't think he needed to stay up and be alert. 
But without the Ritalin, he may be impossible to 
contain.  The day is young and holds many 
surprises!  I'll be here to receive them.

	Also this morning, my mother leaves for a 
trip to Las Vegas with my sister and her husband, 
Bruce.  She'll be gone until Friday afternoon. 
It will be different around here without her.  I 
helped drag her suitcase down the walkway to the 
front of the house so she could wait for Dana and 
Bruce to pick her up.  We hugged and were 
cautioned by her hearing aid that squealed when I 
got close to it.




 
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Weaning


	From the time that Meyshe and Feyna were 
born, I sat with them as they went to sleep for 
the night.  They didn't sleep through until they 
were about a year and a half old, and I was, by 
that time, ragged from rising every night, in the 
midst of dreams, to settle them again, or nurse 
them, or do whatever it took.  When it was time 
for bed for them, I would take them up to the 
nursery and sing to them.  I would sing the same 
songs my Gramma sang to Dana and me when we were 
little.  I memorized all those old songs, 
complete with the fill in sounds she used when 
she'd forgotten the words, like, "Hi lee lee, Hi 
lee lee lee."

	She sang: "The shades of night are 
falling fast.  Fa la la, Fa la la.  And with them 
all our youth doth pass.  Fa la la la la.  Yupa 
deeya, yupa die, Yupa deeya deeya die.  Yupa 
deeya deeya die, yupa deeya die.  Yi yi yi yi yi 
yi yie, Yupa deeya yupa die. Yi yi yi yi yi yi 
yie, Yupa deeya die."  Then the rolling of a 
deep, "R" in the bottom of the back of the 
throat, a low note, "Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr", then 
up an octave, "Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr".

	She sang to us in Yiddish about a little 
goat who stood under the baby's cradle, and went 
to market to do trade in raisins and almonds. 
She sang the butterfly song.  And I sang them 
all, note for note, syllable for syllable, to 
Feyna and Meyshe, stroking their hair, with my 
mouth pressed gently to their skin.

	There was a young college student from 
Düsseldorf, Susanne Siehnholdt, who helped out, 
and she would come with me into the darkened 
nursery.  We'd each hold one of them as I sang, 
and rock them gently.  This was when they were 
only months old.  They would drop off to sleep 
before I was tired of singing, and we'd carry 
them very carefully to their cribs which were 
side by side.  We'd put them down into the soft 
bedding and arrange them in a comfortable 
position, then tip toe out of the room.  Usually 
that was the end of their waking day, but 
occasionally, one would wake up as we were 
leaving the room, and start wailing, which would 
wake the other up, and we had to take it back 
from the beginning.  First sing, wait until they 
calmed and drifted off, make sure they were very 
asleep, then lay them down in their cribs and 
sneak out.

	I was told by some reasonable people that 
I had to train them to sleep through the night 
and the way to do this was to march in to the 
nursery with them at seven o'clock, put them both 
down among their blankets, kiss them sharply on 
the heads, and leave.  Leave flat out.  Leave. 
Not to return again, even if they screamed, 
cried, banged their heads on the sides of their 
cribs, hollered, shrieked and gasped for air. 
But I couldn't bring myself to do that.

	"After a while, they'll learn it's 
hopeless and they'll stop the yelling.  Then you 
can get on with your life."

	I thought about that.  I decided I didn't 
want them to get used to anything being hopeless 
so early in their lives, especially their 
mother's presence.  There would be plenty of time 
for hopelessness later on when they were better 
equipped to deal with it.  So I kept up the 
routine.  It calmed everyone down, sitting there 
in the dark, with each other listening to me sing 
and breathing deeply, quietly as they fell off to 
sleep.

	After tip toeing out of the nursery, it 
was time to feed the rest of the family.  David, 
Alex, Ben and I would sit down at the table I 
inherited from Gramma Fannie and Grampa Benny, 
and we'd have our dinner while I listened for 
noises up in the nursery.  We had a baby monitor 
that I positioned in the dining room, and I had 
one ear tuned to it as I tried to continue my 
evening as if I didn't have two important infants 
snorfling in their cribs fifteen feet away.  If I 
heard a cry, I'd whip the napkin off of my lap 
and bound up the stairs to answer the call.  I 
heard Ben saying, "Why does she have to be in 
such a hurry?  It's just a baby crying."

	And, indeed, why DID I have to be in such 
a hurry?  Because I was hung out to dry when I 
was a child, wandering between the abuse of my 
father and the denial of my mother. Because I 
felt, in spite of the fact that my mother tried 
to satisfy my every whim, that I'd been 
abandoned, and I couldn't bear to hear my own 
children wail into the empty darkness, as I was 
still doing.  What I had wanted was protection, 
and I didn't get it.  I didn't even get validated 
that I needed protection.  It's pathetic really, 
a full grown woman afraid of the emptiness for 
her infant twins.  The darkness and the emptiness 
might have been a comfort to them.  Why not? 
What is inherently frightening about a dark room 
with your mother's voice audible from the next 
room?  But I couldn't listen to them cry without 
rescuing them.

	This is why it was ever so much harder 
for me when the time came to wean them from my 
constant presence at bedtime.  They were a year 
and a half old, and walking, but they still 
needed me to rock them and stay there with them 
until they were out.  Susanne instructed me from 
her nanny's viewpoint.  What I had to do was put 
them gently in their cribs, sing to them as 
usual, kiss them good night, and then walk out 
the door.  I was not to return even if they 
screamed their heads off.

	This was every bit as painful for me as 
it was for them.  That first night, after I left 
and closed the door, they took a few moments to 
figure out what had happened and then started 
crying.  I sat in the hallway on the stairs, 
huddled in a foetal position, hugging my knees, 
my face bent down into my hands, rocking myself 
while they screamed for me.  I felt like I was 
choking them, teaching them in the worst way how 
heartless a place the world could be.  It would 
have been so easy to get up and dash back in, but 
once the process had started, I couldn't go back 
on it.  That would have made it worse.  So I sat 
out there, hunched over, sometimes covering my 
ears, sometimes weeping myself.  It took them 
about an hour to fall asleep, and I was so 
exhausted that I went directly to bed without any 
dinner.  I am so glad that I forget what I 
dreampt that night.



 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net