Sunday, 9/26/99
Naomi: 16 weeks, 3 days. Longest sleep last night: 4 hours, which I'm told is a triumph.

Sukkot at my parents'. I drove down Friday afternoon before sundown with the car packed like we were emigrating, and drove home tonight after the stars came out, which is the kind of compromise my father and I have been making, silently, my whole life.

He's built a sukkah on the back patio every fall since 1965: the same two-by-fours, the same bamboo mats on the roof, the same plastic grapes, which are older than I am and have faded to a sort of gray. This year there's a new decoration, hanging from the roof beside the grapes. A piece of shirt cardboard, with a hole punched in it and a string, and on it in his pharmacist's block capitals: NAOMI'S FIRST SUKKAH.

Saturday night after dinner he took her out there by himself. I watched from the kitchen window. He sat in his folding chair with her on his knee, facing out, and pointed up through the gaps in the roof at the moon, and talked to her the whole time in Yiddish, low, a long, rambling, singsong speech. She listened to every word with her mouth open. I don't speak Yiddish. I asked my mother what he was saying.

"Nonsense," she said. "The kind you say to babies." She dried a plate. "He used to say it to you."

I don't remember that. I've spent my whole life not remembering that. I had to go upstairs for a while.

Tomorrow is Monday. The pump, the files, Mrs. Tavares at 7:45, a grievance hearing at ten. I still don't know what I'm going to tell Naomi someday, when she asks. I'm starting to think part of the answer might be a piece of shirt cardboard on a string. It's 10:40. She'll be up at one. I love her more than sleep, which is saying a good deal, because I have loved sleep more than any man I've ever dated.

Tuesday, 9/21/99
Naomi: 15 weeks, 5 days. Longest sleep: 3 hours.

Yom Kippur was yesterday. I didn't fast. I'm nursing, and I asked the rabbi at my parents' shul, the same one who helped us with her name, and he told me plainly that I shouldn't, and that the baby comes first. I'd been braced for a fight with my father about it.

There was no fight. At noon yesterday, in my parents' kitchen, my father, who has not let a drop of water pass his lips on Yom Kippur since he was thirteen years old, a man who is fasting at that very moment, took a plate down from the cabinet, put crackers and cheese and an apple on it, set it in front of me, and stood there with his arms folded until I'd eaten every bite. Then he went back to shul.

At the closing service, at sundown, I stood at the back with Naomi asleep on my shoulder while the shofar blew, one long last blast, and she didn't even stir. Whatever book gets sealed at that hour, I hope somebody wrote her down in it in very large print.

Thursday, 9/16/99
Naomi: 15 weeks. Longest sleep: 2½ hours. (Hers. Mine was less.)

A note on the pump, for any woman out there about to go back to an office.

It lives in a black shoulder bag that looks exactly like a briefcase, which is fitting, since it goes where I go. Three times a day I close my office door and hang a sign on the knob that Dolores typed for me: IN CONFERENCE. PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB. For a week and a half it has worked beautifully.

Today a senior partner knocked anyway. I said, "I'm in conference." He said, through the door, "With whom?" I said, "With the next generation of the American labor movement." There was a very long silence and then the sound of a senior partner walking away down a carpeted hallway at considerable speed.

Also today: a phone call with a local president while the machine was running. He's a big, gruff man, a former longshoreman. After a minute he said, "Counselor, what's that noise?" I said, "The air conditioning." He said, "Uh-huh," and then, after a pause, "My wife had one of those." And went right back to talking about the pension language. I'd go to the wall for that man.

Sunday, 9/12/99
Naomi: 14 weeks, 3 days. Longest sleep: 3 hours, in shul, during the rabbi's sermon. (Hers.)

Rosh Hashanah in Sharon, the whole two days. Naomi's first new year. She wore the white dress Shira sent, with the lace collar that makes her look like a very small Supreme Court justice.

The first day fell on Shabbos this year, which means no shofar, a point of law my father explained to Naomi at some length over lunch. So today was the day. I sat upstairs in the women's section with her on my lap, next to my mother, and every woman within three rows came by to look. When they blew the shofar the first time she startled so hard both her arms flew straight up, and then she looked around for who was responsible, outraged, and my mother laughed out loud in shul, which I have never known her to do.

Afterward we walked down to the pond for tashlich, where you throw bread crumbs into running water for the year's sins. My father held Naomi. He hasn't let me carry her anywhere in public since July. He tore a piece of bread in two and put half into her fist and closed her fingers around it and then opened them over the water, and the crumbs fell out, and the ducks came. "There," he said to her. "Now you're clean for the year." I don't think she has much on the ledger. But I had a lot of bread.

Thursday, 9/9/99
Naomi: 14 weeks. Longest sleep: I don't remember, and that's an answer.

Three days back at work. Tuesday morning at 7:45 Mrs. Tavares came up the back stairs with her lunch in a plastic bag and took Naomi out of my arms like she was taking a coat, and said, "Go. Go to your work. We are fine." And I went down the stairs, and got in the car, and drove to the corner, and pulled over, and sat there for six minutes with the engine running, and then I went to work.

I called at ten. And at twelve-thirty. And at three. At three Mrs. Tavares said, very kindly, "Ruth. If there is a problem, I call you. You have a job; I have a job," which was a better argument than anything I made in a hearing room all week.

I walked in the door at 6:40. Naomi was on her blanket on the floor, and she turned her head at my voice and smiled with her whole face, and I sat down on the floor in my suit and didn't get up for an hour.

Monday, 9/6/99
Naomi: 13 weeks, 4 days. Longest sleep: 5 hours! (Hers. I lay awake the whole time checking that she was breathing.)

Labor Day. A labor lawyer, on Labor Day, three months after labor. I'm aware.

Last day of leave. I spent it doing absolutely nothing useful. We lay on the living room rug, Naomi and I, and she practiced lifting her head like a very small seal, and I practiced not thinking about tomorrow. Then we walked around Jamaica Pond, the whole way, which is a mile and a half and took us two hours because every third person wanted to look in the stroller.

I've pressed a suit. I've packed the pump. I've written Mrs. Tavares four pages of notes, single-spaced, with headings, which she will very politely never read. I have my alarm set for 5:30. It's midnight. I'm going to go and look at her sleeping for a while, which is the thing I'm going to miss most and which I have no way to bill.

Thursday, 8/26/99
Naomi: 12 weeks. Longest sleep: 4 hours.

We have a nanny. Her name is Mrs. Tavares. She's fifty-eight, she's from Cape Verde by way of Dorchester, she raised five of her own children and, she says, "eleven of other people's," and she came to me through a woman in Gwen's group whose twins she took care of until they went to kindergarten.

She took Naomi out of my arms in the first minute of the interview without asking, which should have annoyed me and didn't. She held her like a loaf of good bread. She sang something to her in Kriolu. Naomi, who had been fussing, stopped and stared at her like she was the moon.

Then I did the thing I'd done at every interview. I said, "I should tell you, there's no father. I did this on my own." Everyone else had reacted: surprise, or pity, or an awful sort of admiration. Mrs. Tavares didn't even look up from the baby. She said, "Children need love. How many people God sends to do it, that's His business."

She starts the day after Labor Day. I offered her more than she asked for. She's worth more than I offered.

Tuesday, 8/17/99
Naomi: 10 weeks, 5 days. Longest sleep: 3 hours.

The nanny search, a brief summary of the record so far:

Candidate one: very sweet. Asked what she'd do if the baby wouldn't stop crying, she said, "Call you." At work. Every time. Candidate two: twenty-three, asked in the first five minutes whether her boyfriend could "hang out" during the day. Candidate three: from an agency, very professional, asked me three separate times, in three different ways, "And the father is...?" until I finally said, "Not a party to this proceeding," and she left. Candidate four: perfect in every way, and needs to leave at five sharp. I haven't left the office at five sharp since 1987.

Better news: Gwen got her referral! A photograph came in the mail on Friday: a solemn baby girl, ten months old, in a padded jacket, looking at the camera like she'd like to see its credentials. Gwen brought it over and put it down on my kitchen table and we both burst into tears, and then Naomi started crying because we were crying, and then all three of us were crying, and then Gwen said, "Look at us. The Three Musketeers," and we couldn't stop laughing. She travels in November.

Tuesday, 8/3/99
Naomi: 8 weeks, 5 days. Longest sleep: I have lost the ability to count.

3:10 a.m. Typing with one hand. She's on the other arm, eating, and making a noise like a very small, contented pig.

Things about the middle of the night that no one told me: It's not dark. There's the streetlight, and the green numbers on the VCR, and the light from the refrigerator when I get up for water, and after a while you know them all like old friends. The college radio station plays the strangest music at this hour. Somebody across the street is always up too; there's a lamp in a window on the third floor, and I've decided it's another mother, and I wave. She has never waved back. I don't hold it against her.

The hard part isn't the tiredness. It's that there's no one to hand her to. No one to nudge and say "your turn." I knew that. I signed up for that, on purpose, with my eyes open, and I'd do it again. But I didn't know what it would feel like at 3:10 in the morning in the second month. It feels like being the only lifeguard on a very long beach.

Then she stops eating and looks up at me, milk-drunk and cross-eyed, and grins, for the first time, a real one, and the beach is fine. The beach is fine.

Sunday, 7/11/99
Naomi: 5 weeks, 3 days. Longest sleep: who knows. It was a big weekend.

The naming was yesterday, at my father's shul, on Shabbos morning. He'd arranged it with the rabbi himself, back in June, before he'd so much as held her.

The rabbi and I had had a long, careful conversation the week before about what comes after the word "bat," daughter of, in her Hebrew name, and I'm going to spare you all of it except to say that we found an answer that both of us could live with and that I'll be able to explain to her someday without looking at the floor.

Then yesterday my father was called up to the Torah. He stood at the reading table in his big tallis, and I stood in the women's section, holding her, and he said her name. Naomi Chana. He said it in the voice he uses for the blessings, loud and plain. He didn't hesitate for one second. Not on any word.

And then, at the kiddush afterward, in the social hall, with the herring and the kugel and the little cups of wine, he held out his arms for her. For the first time. I gave her to him. And he carried her around that room for an hour and ten minutes, I timed it, from table to table, to every man he's prayed next to for thirty years, saying "My granddaughter. Naomi. Look at her. Look at the chin." He would not give her back. My mother had to physically remove her from him to change her.

I stood by the coffee urn and watched it and understood that I was watching a man fall in love, and that there wasn't a thing in the world either of us could do about it.

Tuesday, 6/29/99
Naomi: 3 weeks, 5 days. Longest sleep: 2 hours. Mine: 90 minutes, twice, maybe.

Evidence of sleep deprivation, submitted for the record: I put the cordless phone in the refrigerator. I tried to pay for gas with my library card. I cried at a commercial for tires. I left the apartment wearing one black shoe and one navy one, which is not so bad, except that one was a sneaker.

My parents came up on Sunday. My father sat on my couch in his windbreaker for two hours and watched Naomi sleep in her bassinet. He didn't hold her. My mother offered her to him twice. He shook his head, and folded his hands, and just looked. I was hurt, and then, watching his face, I wasn't. He was looking at her the way he looks at the Torah when they carry it around the shul: like something holy that you don't touch with your bare hands.

Then, at the door, he said the naming will be at his shul on the tenth. He has already spoken to the rabbi. It was not a question.

Monday, 6/14/99
Naomi: 11 days old. Longest sleep: 2 hours, which I spent staring at her.

Day eleven. My mother is still here, in the second bedroom, on the pull-out, and she has taken over my kitchen, my laundry and my telephone with the calm authority of a woman who has done this for two children and four grandchildren and was beginning to think I'd never ask.

The baby eats every two hours, around the clock. I used to think I knew what tired was. I billed twenty-six hundred hours in 1996. That was not tired. That was a long walk on a nice day.

But at five this morning, after the four o'clock feed, the light came up gray through the porch door and the birds started, and Naomi was asleep on my chest with one hand fisted in my T-shirt, and my mother came in in her bathrobe and stood there and looked at the two of us for a long time, and then said, very softly, "Well. You did it, Ruthie."

That's the first time anybody has said that to me. I didn't realize how much I'd been waiting for someone to.