We bought a crib on September 10, 2001. After watching our nation’s tragedy the next morning, we turned off the news and quietly began to build the crib, as if rebuilding our belief in the future. We did not know if our baby was going to be a boy or girl, but we were certain it was going to need a crib. A separate room. And for the beginning, a borrowed bassinet.

G was just a few hours old when a nurse came into our hospital room. “Let me take the baby. You can get some rest!”

I had to fight myself from exclaiming, “Are you out of your mind? I’ve waited my whole life for this.” Instead I smiled, “No, thank you.”

Next to my hospital bed was a plastic isolette. G went to sleep after nursing, and we carefully put her in it, giving us a chance to have a late dinner and try to sleep ourselves. A while later, she cried. I lifted her into my arms. She nursed, slept, and I put her back in the isolette. Not long thereafter, she woke up again. I repeated the routine. She woke up again. The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. I decided to hold her in my arms. She slept for the longest stretch. We both got some rest, and the outline of our early days presented itself.

Aside from naps when I transferred her, asleep, onto her mattress, the crib never was used. Neither was her room.

As an infant, G’s favorite place was next to us. She would not go to sleep with a mattress or sheepskin for company, and she only stayed in the bassinette if I kept my arm in it, too. If I tried to sneak it out, she would wake up. Finally, her dad said, “Just bring her into bed with us.”

I was skeptical. “Are you sure? This may be hard to un-do.”

“But what about today? You’ll sleep better. So will she.” He was right.

We settled into a pattern of comfortable co-sleeping thanks to my favorite parenting advice: do what works best for your child and family. Everything felt much more natural. Not only did my sleep improve, G had less gas, burps and stress. Ergo less tears. The icing on the cake was waking up to smiles.

Having a family bed was a far cry from my childhood model in which tracks were laid at the outset for firmness and emotional distance. Gratefully, her dad supported my burgeoning parenting instincts. Follow. Listen. Discover my own truth.

Were we really pre-wired to sleep alone in separate rooms with central heating and cooling?

Our assumptions were crumbling as we embraced the basics and let everything else go. By this point I had read Liedloff’s The Continuum Concept, Sears’s Baby Book, and Small’s Our Babies, Our Selves, reinforcing pre-wired parenting as my new rubric. Very little of it could be bought at the store.

A few days after G was born, we needed something from CVS. I had been away from the commercial world for six months and got visually assaulted when I walked the door: fluorescent lights, clashing bright red and orange packaging. Pirates of consciousness. The silent scream of marketing. Products competing one another to hijack my attention. Culture shock, a few blocks from home. While I reacclimated, the memory never faded. Was this what little children experienced in our world, open as they were?

Seeds continued to grow in my mind about living more purely.