How I fell in love with a rocking chair
By: Bridget K. Cherry
Tags: Parenting, Baby, Objects, Motherhood

To fasten a rocking chair securely to the top of a Ford Pinto requires patience, strong ropes, and expert advising — in this case from my grandfather. My mother was four months pregnant with me when the rocking chair, a Christmas gift, voyaged 180 miles to the apartment in the Bronx that would be my first home, my father nervously lurching through toll plazas to the laughs of strangers, accelerating cautiously lest the chair become a sail and tug them off the highway. I picture my parents struggling to unwrap the ropes when they arrived, delighted that the chair hadn’t catapulted itself off the car.

The rocking chair was a treasured possession for my parents. “A rocking chair is very useful,” my mother would say with a smile. I had never understood why anyone wouldn’t prefer to sit on a comfy couch or armchair, or swing at the park rather than tilt back and forth sedately. But then, this summer, I brought my own daughter home from the hospital.

My daughter was orange like a smoggy summer sunset when I first sat in our gliding chair with her. She had spent the first few days of her life losing the ample cushion of weight she had accumulated in the womb, finding sleeping preferable to the hard work of eating.

The chair itself was wooden, with gray-green padding rubbed sparse in spots, covered in spots and stains from its previous use with other small children — my sister’s two kids and the colleague who gave it to my sister. It was a step up from my parents’ wooden chair, but I felt doubtful of its usefulness, in the same way that I was skeptical of the need for the bouncer and swing, the baby tub and toys, and the overflowing tub of onesies. In the hospital, where my husband and I spent three nights with our baby, we operated in a lean environment, with just a bed and bassinet and a stash of diapers.

At home, our doctors agreed, our kiddo needed milk, lots of it, and I needed to stay awake and feed her for hours every day and night. In the hospital, I had fed her in my bed, but I quickly realized that I would be tempted to doze off in bed.

So when the alarm went off at 1 am, and then 4 am, and then 7 am, I would wrench myself out of bed, rouse our little one, and — after my husband changed her diaper — shuffle over to the chair with our faithful boppy cushion, and feed her.

That chair was the place where I sat with her for hours, tickling her feet and rubbing her belly to keep her awake as she ate. I would sit in the half-darkness, by the light of our owl nightlight, listening to our daughter sputter and cough and finally suck.

It was where I rocked her when she snoozed, mouth gaping open, a little triangle below her upturned nose. It was where I burped her and placed her once again on the boppy for more milk, more milk, always more milk.

“You don’t have to wake her up at night,” said the doctor one day, “She’s old enough now and she has gained enough weight.” We celebrated and marveled at how much less carrot-hued she appeared, how much chunkier her arms were — “like a Michelin man,” a woman in our building remarked to us, and we took it as a compliment.

But our routine remained of early morning feedings in the chair, when the only sounds outside our apartment were the occasional siren and the slamming of the door to the stairwell, every day at 4 am. It took me months to realize that it was the newspaper delivery person moving on to the next floor.

Every day it seems like there is a new milestone, but the chair is still there, a little more milk-splattered, a loyal companion. When my daughter was refusing to take a bottle and we were preparing for my return to work, my mother fed our kiddo, half asleep, in the chair. I was sitting in the chair with the little one when my parents came into the bedroom to remind me and my husband to head out for our first date night after the arrival of our child.

My sister asked me recently whether she could take the chair back. My husband and I had already begun piling up too-small clothes and the bassinet and the other accoutrements of early baby life, to return to her family. But the chair!

A few days later, my sister called me back. A neighbor was giving away a gilder chair — a newer chair, with white cushions. “We’ll just use that,” she told me. I smiled.

Some day, I expect my daughter will ask why we have an old, gray-green chair still hanging around. “A rocking chair is very useful,” I plan to respond.