Closet Baby

It was supposed to be a temporary solution, and then it kept not being temporary, and then suddenly we had a one-year-old child sleeping between the shoe rack and the sweaters in our bedroom closet, and a three-year-old who got a real kick out of telling people about it.  

We didn’t intend to stash our infant in a storage room like a neglected Victorian orphan, nor did we need to. Downstairs from us, an entire spare bedroom, small but lovely and glowing with sunlight in the afternoons, steadily gathered dust: a shrine to the fallacy of making plans for a person who hasn’t yet arrived. Visitors asked if it was, or would be, the new baby’s room, and I’d give a wobbly answer (“oh, eventually!”), embarrassed about the squandered space.

I nested furiously in my first pregnancy, busily filling those spring 2020 days with hanging artwork and arranging bookshelves. In my second pregnancy, I did not have quite so much effort to spare. Still, every week or two in my third trimester, something new would arrive in the spare room gesturing to its future inhabitant: polka dot blackout curtains, framed floral risographs, a changing pad perched on top of the tiny wooden dresser I’d carted around since college.

Then the baby arrived, and the room was, suddenly and unexpectedly, so extremely far away from me. Her arrival had shifted the natural order of things in a way that stretched any physical distance between us to unfathomable lengths. Relegating her to the downstairs room suddenly felt as though we would be sticking her in a detached garage, or an abandoned wing of a sprawling manor, or Tucson. 

So, in that limbo it remained: no crib, no rocking chair, no board books or stuffies, and perhaps most critically, no baby, who was still upstairs with us, snug in a mini-crib just inches from my spot in the bed. That nighttime proximity seemed to tether us umbilically: the slightest movement I made would jar her awake, and vice versa; in the middle of the night, my eyes would open, and then she would stir just seconds later. I recalled, with longing, how much better our older son started sleeping as soon as we stopped room-sharing (or kicked him out, as we joked). It became rather clear that the baby and I needed space. 

The first baby's room, versus the second

But exiling her downstairs was — in a way I couldn’t articulate, yet could feel with my whole entire body — way too much space. So, into the closet she went.

I mean, we made it nice. There was a glowing sound machine and a baby monitor camera, and nothing but a thin bedroom wall separating us. An Instagram-ready nursery it was not, but it worked: the windowless space stayed dark at all hours, and I’m pretty sure all the hanging clothes muffled the sounds of our three-year-old shrieking the lyrics to Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” just one room over. (And yes, there is ventilation.)

At night, a small, squat brass duck-shaped doorstop, a relic from the previous homeowners, kept the closet door propped open a few inches — ostensibly so that I could hear her, and also because fully shutting a closet door with a baby inside felt a tiny bit illegal. But in a less explainable way, because it felt as though closing the door might snip that invisible string between us right in two, like cutting a ship from its anchor.

With this new setup, at our own grown-up bedtime, we could brush our teeth with the lights on, talk louder than a whisper, even watch a show on my laptop in bed. More importantly, we began to sleep. And as the months slid out from under us and the baby continued her residency in the closet, what initially felt like an awkward stopgap took on the veneer of normalcy. We got used to it, all of us. I’d momentarily forget, and mention it breezily to friends and visitors without explanation (“oh, the baby’s awake, let me just run up to the closet and grab her!”). And in our household, it became almost like a family punchline: to our three-year-old, I would say something like, “Okay, bud, I’m going to go put Claire to bed.” Without missing a beat, he would fill in the rest, smirking and singsongy: “in the closet, where she lives…” 

But the solution was not perfect. By the time we, the adults, were ready for bed, the closet was completely off-limits, which meant our dirty clothes often ended up on furniture or, in my case, a pile on the floor. After feeding and rocking her back to sleep in the middle of the night, I’d set a sleeping baby down in the crib, only for my shoulder to bump against the ironing board hanging from the back of the door and wake her all over again.

And then there was the cursed duck, which was an effective doorstop but an even more effective middle-of-the-night booby trap — one we regularly tripped over after spending a half-hour desperately rocking and shushing and trying to get the baby back to sleep, carefully laying her down in the crib, ever so quietly and slowly backing out of the closet without so much as breathing, only for the thud of brass against the door to wake her and start the process all over again, defeating you like the final boss of a video game and rudely stubbing your toe in the process.   

Despite the vile duck’s best efforts, the baby did begin learning to sleep for three hours, then four, then sometimes more. She learned how to, sometimes, fall back asleep on her own in the night. I learned how to twist my torso in order to exit the closet without banging the ironing board against the door, and how to carefully feel for the cool, heavy weight of that heinous duck with my big toe, then step around it. Our tether remains intact, though elastic. It stretches a little more every day, and a brass doorstop will only anchor her to me for so long.

For now, the spare room remains empty. At night, the duck still stands sentry at the closet door.