Crib Notes
I’ve been planning an overhaul of the back room just behind our kitchen. It’s currently an office for my husband and I, but we’re dismantling it soon to make room for a nursery. I’ve been told by a few people that this room is unnecessary for a newborn—the baby won’t even sleep in it for the first few months and doesn’t really need anything. This sounds good, but meanwhile stacks of things dropped off by friends are starting to pile up behind corners and under desks. Keeping it simple is welcome advice and helps when trying to ignore all the relentless parenting blogs filled with lists of must-haves, but the thing is, I still want the nursery.
My PhD research has been extra-challenging over the past few months, making the usual stress and precariousness that accompanies the lives of PhD students even more apparent. I’m a big advocate for there being no right time to have a kid. Student? Go for it! Unpredictable freelancer? Go for it! No savings? Who cares! We are a resilient species. And okay, fine, the baby doesn’t need anything, but what about me?
What do I need?
It’s been valuable to think about this new room, this new space in our home. It’s hard to explain. While everything else is unknown and beyond my control, this room is solid and concrete. It feels like a physical and external manifestation of what’s happening inside me. Something I can see and touch.
Knowing the space will soon exist is calming. It reassures me that my life isn’t a shit show. Manually carving out this room is a slow process that parallels the monumental physical and psychological space this new person will occupy. There is something significant about feeling like you’re providing a solid, caring place for this new dependent. But what does a caring space look and feel like? And it better not be pink and plastic…
There’s a classic study that looked at nurturing and affection in infant monkeys. Forced to pick between a cold, metal food dispenser or a soft, cuddly “mother” with no food, baby monkeys chose the tactile comfort and risked starvation. Building on this notion, a more recent investigation looked at connections in human’s sensory perception and our emotional state. It seems that like the baby monkeys, when we’re feeling down, we seek out tactile comfort—wrapping oneself in a favourite cashmere sweater or curling up in a soft billowy blanket. This sensory significance pushes the nursery beyond its aesthetic Pinterest appeal and asks for an embodied comfort to be created. This is a very pleasurable assignment for me that involves filling a room with beautifully soft and whimsical things. Pregnant women don’t get a lot of love—everything we do or consume must be healthy and nurturing for the baby. However, by pushing aside the cartoony, pastel, plastic baby aesthetic, I’ve focused on curating a room that’s comforting… to me.
Just thinking about this space fills me with delight and joy. Joy has fast become the hallmark quality for organizing and de-cluttering the home. Marie Kondo’s rule of thumb “does it bring you joy?” delves into our relationship with how things effect us at an emotional, aesthetic and /or sensory level. This sorting process helps navigate singular objects, but then what are we left with? Ultimately for me, questions like: does a space provoke curiosity? or how does a room engage us? are equally significant. These questions are not answered by our eyes alone, but also through our imagination and our bodies.
In her book, Healing Spaces, Esther Sternberg looks at how our perception of the environment, “its features of light and dark, sound and smell, temperature and touch, feed into the brain through our senses and trigger the brain’s emotional centers,” which can release stress hormones or activate “opiate-rich nerve cells” that can almost make us feel high. Sounds good to me.
So as this room slowly manifests, my hope is that it feels good and inspires me and ultimately, one day that the same qualities are felt by its new inhabitant. Until then, it’s my reminder that I can do this—me and this space.
