#29 Thoughts at 3 AM
A crib, social security nets, cheese. Also: free films for a months, a too-true novel, and the best eggs in town.
⭕️ Criterion Collection I have a code for a free month of the Criterion Channel if you’re wanting more long-form film in your life: MOVIEFRIENDS.1
⭕️ The Turkish Eggs at Upper Left Roasters Greek yogurt, dill, garlic, two poached eggs, butter with paprika and cumin, spelt toast on the side. It’s a perfect dish I could eat daily.2
⭕️ Tilt The premise of this debut novel by Emma Pattee is this: A woman is 37 weeks pregnant and shopping for a crib at the Portland IKEA when the big one hits. Over the course of a day, she makes her way through the resulting chaos to try and find her husband.3
⭕️ Do you need help? Ask Bea. Questions are due today!4
Some of the things I think about when I can’t fall back asleep at 3 AM.
I wake up at least once every night, needing to pee. Some nights I can fall back asleep (with help from brown noise, an eye mask, and the pillow fort I build around me); others I can’t.
This is (some of) what I think about:
There is a lot I feel really good about in how we’ve raised the boys. One I thing I absolutely want to do differently this time: sleeping through the night.
I’ve become convinced that this is possible because I read Bringing Up Bébé last week, and French babies “do their nights” within the first few months (mine took years — I did not actually sleep for more than a couple hours at a time for their first three-ish years).
When the time comes, this will require tender patience and firm resolve.
It will also require a crib.
We didn’t have a crib when Pan was born. Our plan was to co-sleep, and we did. Just without much of the sleep parting. We got a crib around the time Orion was born, when Pan was 14 months old, because I didn’t know how we’d do two babies in our full-size bed. Of course, by morning, all of us ended up in bed together anyways. The only sleep I got then was when Seb got up to make oatmeal with the boys in the morning and I got 40 minutes alone in bed.
One or the other (or both) of the boys ended up in our bed most nights, until they were about 10. I miss this now, the comfort our bodies had with each other. Knowing that when they woke up at night, the comfort they wanted was us.
But also: I now know what it is to get 8 hours of real sleep in a night, and how that makes everything better, more doable. I know that my mental health is contingent on getting enough sleep, and that my desire for the early years with this baby not to be colored by pendulous leaps between depression and anxiety is possible if I can care for myself in ways I wasn’t able to the first times around.
I generally have a “we’ll make it work” mindset about things. If I want something, I’m willing to be uncomfortable to get it. This hasn’t always served me well.
So, a crib.
In this dear, tiny house that we love and are not ready to leave, there is exactly zero wall space available for a crib.
For several months, I’ve been scouring Facebook Marketplace for a mini crib on wheels (extending my search to Washington, even, I don’t mind a long drive), which could be easily moved and tucked into our bedroom closet (the only closet in the house). This was the solution I’d landed on and the sourcing challenge my anxiety rallied around.
At 3 AM: This mini crib will only work for a few months, and then we’ll have to find a bigger sleep space for him.
Better to solve this now, while I can’t sleep, than when the baby is already here and I can’t sleep.
My mind’s eye (beneath the sleep mask) begins to scan the space we have. The boys’ rooms are off-limits. They only have a few more years in them, anyways. Could I clear out everything in the closet and convert it into a crib-sized nursery? No, too hard to relocate everything in there that still needs to be accessed on a daily basis. Our bed is built into the wall, takes up almost the entirety of three of the room’s four walls, elevated above the drawers where Sebastian stores his clothes. That’s not moving. The only real possibility is the 35 inches of wall between the bedroom door and closet where my dresser currently lives.
We could put a smaller-than-standard (but big enough to last at least beyond a year) crib here if I relocate everything in, on, and above the dresser — which means clearing out and relocating some items currently in the closet, on the bedroom bookshelf, and in the living room credenza. Which also means finally posting and selling the IKEA bags of clothes that have been taking up valuable corner space since my last clean-out.
If you give a pregnant brain a problem to solve at 3 AM, it will want to keep going.
You know what else I couldn’t stop thinking about after reading that book? The fact that all working French mothers are entitled to 16 weeks paid leave (usually around 100% of their earned daily wages) and access to state-subsidized crèches (high quality child care).
In Oregon, we’re lucky to have a recently-implemented Paid Leave program that all working parents can access for up to 12 weeks — but it only covers up to 60% of pay (at a moment when you’re taking on enormous expenses), and there can be lengthy delays in receiving benefits.
When I bring up this discrepancy in conversation I’m surprised at the response I get. Not so much amongst other parents of young children, who are also baffled by how hard the U.S. makes it for people to actually have the babies the pronatalist movement insists we have, but with the next generation or two up, who likely had no paid leave options when their children were born — but also benefitted from raising children during a time when it was possible to do so on a single income, who are on the other side of it now. Silence.
At 3 AM I think about what exactly this silence means.
Is it a “I suffered through it so you should too” silence? Is it a “If it’s going to be so hard, why are you having another baby” silence? Is it a “You should have thought about all these things before you got pregnant” silence? Is it a “I don’t want our tax dollars going towards a social safety net that I won’t personally benefit from” silence?
Although my fuzzy pregnant brain makes their lack of response feel personal, I also know that we’ve got plans in place to make this — having another baby — work without entirely upending our financial wellbeing (🤞🏼🤞🏼). I think we’re going to be okay, and we’re lucky to have a strong personal support system. But my concern, and outrage, isn’t just for myself. Our entire society would benefit from better supported families, from all of our children being better cared for. And here we are dismantling the meager systems we do have in place.
I also think about how French families course out their meals with a vegetable to start and a cheese to finish. I think about where I might find a good cheese to eat after dinner, and what kind of cheese I might like.
I think about whether I’ll get up with my 5 AM alarm, or keep trying to solve all our problems and hit snooze until 6.
At 25 weeks,
I’ve noticed that my attentional capacity for full-length movies has suffered in recent years, and there are two things I’m doing this year to shift that: watching more good films and leaving my phone in another room while I do so.
Some favorites that are currently streaming: Daisies, The Great Dictator, Party Girl (early Parker Posey!), Tampopo, Coffee and Cigarettes, The Gleaners and I, Babette’s Feast, Hannah and Her Sisters, Grey Gardens, Picnic at Hanging Rock, An Angel at My Table, Chilly Scenes of Winter, Godland, Metropolitan, All We Imagine is Light, Frances Ha.
Also - this is just a code they sent me in a subscriber email; it’s not unique to me / I don’t get anything from it! Katie Merchant often recommends good ones that stream on this channel on her instagram.
Finish off whatever yogurt-y, yolk-y sauce is left in the dish with a spoon.
Yes this absolutely hit too close to home, especially as I found myself speed walking through that very same IKEA this weekend to buy some hangers and couldn’t stop picturing the towers of flat packs collapsing on me. That said, it’s a good read! But be warned, Portlanders: you won’t be able to look at a brick school building the same ever again.
Beatrice Kilat’s areas of expertise include: dogs; money; life, death; closet space; ceramics; utensils; kitchens; time management; having a drink; putting it down; want vs need; upkeep (general). To this list, I would add: hosting out-of-town visitors (and making it a true delight); recommended reading (of many genres); where to find the best vintage denim in the Bay Area.
What a lovely shout out! 😘🤗🥰