No satisfaction compares to the feeling I get after shutting the nursery door having successfully put my fourteen-month-old daughter Senita to sleep.
My shoulders loosen in that tip-toed moment and even the air somehow tastes sweeter (though it’s very possible that taste is actually microscopic mold spores floating in her humidifier’s cool mist stream).
Yet the feeling doesn’t last long.
Like the wrinkly old man in Shawshank Redemption, I can no longer enjoy freedom. I go straight from her nursery door to the baby monitor, which will be my companion for the rest of the night.
Baby monitors are wireless umbilical cords pulling parents back into the nursery at the slightest disturbance.
The second the monitor makes a noise, everything stops. Electronics are muted, books put down, food goes unchewed lest a wayward crunch turns the disturbance into a baby-waking incident.
If an alien randomly selected my home to learn about mankind, it would believe that the baby monitor is a deity I both worship and fear.
The baby monitor is the first thing I reach for in the morning and the last thing I look at most nights. It is a constant reminder that for the next several years, I’ll rarely ever be alone.
I don’t view the baby monitor as a shackle, it has far too many fascinating features for that, including a video camera with night vision technology allowing it to work in nearly pitch-dark conditions.
The camera swivels 180-degrees and has a magnified zoom setting. It also has a two-way microphone that I’ve never used for anything other than scaring my wife and a built-in thermometer displaying the room’s temperature.
Though it isn’t a manufacturer-listed feature, I believe the baby monitor also directly controls my daughter’s behavior.
This is why I constantly say things to it like, “Go back to sleep!” or “Self-soothe. For the love of God, please self-soothe!”
Despite all the bells and whistles, a baby monitor is essentially just a tool providing an over-complicated answer to a rather simple question: is the baby awake or sleeping?
I call this riddle “Schrodinger’s Cat Nap.” Absent any proof to the contrary, until I check the monitor the baby is both sleeping and awake.
Watching a sleeping baby is disorienting because they don’t have any of the traditional bedtime props like pillows and blankets.
Look at a sleeping child and it’s easy to see when they’re comfortable because they’re snuggling a stuffed animal tucked in tight with a comforter and pillows. But look at a sleeping baby and all you see is a freakishly still body laying flat on a sheet.
It was a welcome relief when Senita started tucking herself into a ball giving some appearance of peaceful sleep.
The only thing other than her in the crib is a WubbaNub pacifier with a penguin attached. It is adorable when properly used. However, when the penguin is splayed on it’s back next to her in a crib and viewed through a baby monitor, it looks exactly like a dead squirrel.
But I’d much rather see my daughter sleeping peacefully next to a dead squirrel than to see her sitting upright, perfectly still, staring at the monitor’s camera as if she’s planning an insurrection.
While watching a sleeping baby is disorienting, watching a perfectly quiet awake baby is downright disturbing.
“Why is she just sitting there!?” I’ll ask out loud, knowing the monitor won’t respond but hoping it will somehow force her hand – either to cry to start my day or to curl back up providing me a few more minutes of responsibility-free bliss.
In those moments, we’re connected.
Her staring in the darkness at a camera and me two rooms away staring in the darkness at a corresponding monitor. With only the soothing sound of her white noise machine in the background, it is a moment so still you can almost feel our hearts beat.
Wirelessly. Together. In this moment and forevermore.
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