ABSTRACT
By the time my first daughter, Ilana, was three weeks old, I knew I was in trouble. Welling up within me was a tremendous conflict over where she should sleep: in bed with me and my husband, in a bassinet next to us, or in her own crib in another room. A part of me saw her as a helpless creature who, just a few weeks earlier, had been connected to me in the most intimate sense—although each time she'd kicked inside me, she reminded me that we were actually separate beings. I'd become convinced, in fact, that all those underwater swimming dreams I had while I was carrying Ilana came more from my baby's unconsciousness than from my own. Now that I could physically see the child who had been such an intricate part of my own being, I couldn't imagine keeping her apart from me, and from the warmth of my breasts, for more than a few minutes at a time.
