I’m sure you didn’t really think I was managing my six kids
without a baby nurse. I mean come on--I’m human. And I live in the city where
for almost every new mother a baby nurse is a duh. Although, when I first found
out I was pregnant I decided I wouldn’t need a nurse this time around. I figured
I have a good babysitter who would surely be able to help me with the baby and my
other four girls are in school all day. Piece of cake.
But that was when I thought I was having one baby. With the
news that two were on the way, the circumstances changed. “You must get a baby
nurse,” everyone said to me in panic. You see I had to be convinced because I
never really was a baby nurse person. I’m a little bit of a control freak,
especially with training a baby to sleep, and since as I told you before I was
always a breastfeeder, determined to nurse through the night and not skip any
feeds, there really was never a compelling reason to have a nurse for very long.
If you don’t use them at night, what’s the point?
I also had never really had much luck with baby nurses. For
Gabby, I had a nurse who was very sweet, weighed over 300 pounds, and had a bad
hip that rendered her borderline immobile. She went back to sleep in the
morning till about noon, snoring like a rhino on the living room couch (we had
a one bedroom then), and liked to eat dinner with me and Rob every night. Still,
she introduced me to the Johnson and Johnson lavender scented bedtime bath, my
favorite baby smell in the world, and for that I’ll always be thankful. After
eight days I told her I thought I was ok on my own, and we parted quite
amicably. She even took the recipe for my mother’s cholent as well as the Kosher
Palette cookbook, whose dishes she had loved so much during her time with us.
My next baby nurse never showed and sent another 300 pound,
gold-toothed replacement instead. My third baby nurse I caught smoking in the
bathroom. And my fourth baby nurse, I really liked but had a job two weeks after
me, and so there was no opportunity to extend her stay.
Still, I knew twins were a different story, and anyone I
knew who had twins had used a baby nurse, often for very long periods of time and
so I decided I should not try to be a hero. I found someone who said she “loved doing
twins,” told me she’s “very easy,” “happy to eat anything” I have in the house,
and I booked her for three months.
What an interesting three months it has been. And by
interesting I mean maddening. Nearly every day I cried to my husband about
something she was doing or not doing. She made no attempt to get the babies on
any schedule. Any time they woke up, she immediately rocked them back to sleep,
shouting at them to “shush, shush shush.” And when they were sleeping she woke
them to eat. (My twins were not preemies who needed to be wakened.) She’d lower
the shades to begin their “night” at 5:30 pm. From her very first night in the
house, she insisted both babies needed a “top off”—and remember I was the dairy
queen. Nearly every night that I walked into her room—their room—one or both
babies was sleeping on a boppy pillow on her bed, while even in the darkness I
could see the words printed in bold letters “No Para Dormir” (not for
sleeping). Most nights when she brought one or more into my room to breastfeed,
I was handed a baby with wet clothes. “I think he’s wet,” I told her. “It’s
just sweat,” she told me. Sweat? That’s a first, a newborn sweating in my 67-degree
air-conditioned house. When I asked her when she would expect my babies to
start sleeping through the night—my other kids slept 12 hour-nights by two or
three months--she responded with a philosophical question, “does anyone really
sleep through the night? Even adults get up to get some water or go to the
bathroom.”
And as for being easy? Yes I suppose she was, so long as we
loaned her our ipad, made sure she had full selection of cable channels on her
TV, gave her small advances of pay, and didn’t ask her to go for any walks. (Though
from the Caribbean, she did not like the sun.). And as for eating anything?
Yes, I suppose she did that too—so long as it was freshly sliced nova, baked
salmon salad, baby lamp chops, or the sunny-side up eggs she’d ask me to make
for her every morning.
I knew pretty quickly I was in big trouble and I made a
bunch of calls to other nurses, who either wanted more money per day than Lebron,
or they weren’t available, or they needed every Sunday off, or they asked me to
describe the room they’d be sleeping in, and so I never made the switch. And
unfortunately, as much as I wanted to send her on her way and do it on my own,
with twins I knew I couldn’t be down a man. I needed her so I could leave my
babies freely during the day and help my older girls get back to school. I
needed her so I could pull off meals and synagogue attendance over the Jewish
holidays. I needed her so I could try
and get a five or six hour stretch each night to make it through the next day.
In the end, with two weeks left in her term, right before a
long Jewish holiday weekend where I was having a lot of company, she left for
her day off, saying she felt a little “sick” and never returned. Like a
boyfriend I knew I should have broken up with first, I felt stung, but the
truth is, my babies have never seemed better. Over the past week, one twin is
sleeping the 12 hour night a baby should, and my other one is getting close.
They are cleaner, they take naps, in cribs, they have not slept on pillows, and
the whole tempo in my house is actually a lot calmer. I am surely more tired, but at least I feel
my babies are being well cared for.
What a weird thing the whole baby nurse phenomenon is. The majority are not nurses. They have no
nursing degree, they are just willing to give up a lot of sleep so we don’t
have to. And the strangest part is that those of us lucky enough to afford a
baby nurse are normally so critical and micromanaging of every other aspect of
our children’s lives—we search for the perfect babysitters, the perfect
doctors, the perfect speech, physical and occupational therapists, the perfect
teachers, tutors, what have you, and yet along comes some woman wearing scrubs
with teddy bears on them, and we hand over our newborn child to them, at his or
her most vulnerable, precious and important time.
The whole three months I felt
like a character in “The Help,” leaving my little ones out of earshot, down the
hall in someone else’s quarters, only in my real-life scenario that someone has
no nursing degree, or knowledge of babies for that matter. She didn’t even know
the words to classic lullabyes. From down the hall I’d hear her singing “the
itsy bitsy spider climbing up the wall.” And as for simple tasks like preparing
a formula bottle, she believed that the instructions printed on the back of the
powder box to “add 1 unpacked scoop to each 2 fl oz of water was actually
mistaken, and that you have to put less water in since the liquid rises once
the powder is added. Hmm. Go figure, the makers of Similac and Enfamil have a
lot to learn.
But it’s over. The babies are all mine, and I’m crying a lot
less. When the twins are older I’ll enjoy telling them funny stories about the
“nurse” who took care of them for nearly three months, and with whom they
watched nearly every moment of the 2012 Summer Olympics and the US Open on HD
TV. But in the more immediate future, I’ll make sure they know that the itsy
bitsy spider actually went up the water spout.
