Six Cribs in My Living Room
When I came down at two, Lauren was rocking Ava in my grandmother’s chair and Stephanie was sitting on the floor reading a board book about a duck to three babies at once.
The first week was hard. I will not pretend it was not. Six babies is a lot of babies in a fourteen-foot room.
Two of them had colds. Brody did not believe in naps. Owen got his first tooth on the bottom on Wednesday and was furious about it the whole day.
But the notebook on the kitchen counter filled up with Lauren’s neat printing and Stephanie’s scrawl and my nurse handwriting. Every bottle, every diaper, every nap.
At the end of each day the parents read the notebook when they picked up, and most nights somebody left a casserole on the counter.
Amy’s mother made chicken pot pie, the real kind with the square noodles, the way my grandmother made it, and left a whole roaster of it on my stove on Wednesday.
Kyle’s mother sent shoofly pie. Somebody left a case of diapers on the porch with no note.
Mia had the hardest time. She was used to her grandmother’s house, the same room she had been in since she was a newborn, the same voice.
In my living room she cried every time we laid her down, a thin, tired cry that broke my heart a little more every time.
On Thursday, the fourth day, she cried for forty minutes at nap time. Lauren tried rocking her. Stephanie tried the duck book.
I came down from sleeping and tried walking her up and down the narrow room with her head on my shoulder, past the couch and back.
Nothing worked. Then, on a whim, I laid her down in Owen’s crib, right next to him, because he was already out cold with his stuffed cow under his arm and his mouth open. I just wanted to see.
Mia stopped crying. She turned her head and looked at Owen. Then she reached out one hand, slow, and put it on his arm, the way babies do when they are checking that something is real. And she closed her eyes.
Owen did not wake up. He just moved a little in his sleep, the way he does, and his hand found hers on the sheet and stayed there.
The two of them lay there in that white portable crib with their hands touching, breathing together, and the whole room went quiet.
Lauren put her hand over her mouth. Stephanie got out her phone and took a picture and then put the phone away and just looked.
I stood there in my sweatshirt with my hair coming down and I cried, standing in my own living room, over two babies taking a nap.
They had napped side by side in Pam’s baby room for eight months, I realized. In the next crib over.
They had been hearing each other breathe since they were tiny. Mia did not need her grandmother’s house. She needed Owen.
After that, they always napped together. It was the one rule nobody had to write in the notebook. When Kristy came at five fifteen that night, I showed her the picture Stephanie had taken.
She looked at it for a long time and did not say anything, and then she asked if Stephanie would send it to her.
Kristy did what she said she would. By the second Sunday, the whole church knew whose baby came through my door first. She did not stand up in the service or make any kind of announcement.