Way back in 2015, when the Hubs and I began to contemplate parenthood, we made a choice to actively reject the fear-mongering that is omnipresent in American media and culture. We saw many new parent friends be consumed by worry about drowning, strangulation, SIDS, falls, choking, electrocution, suffocation, overexposure, and mauling by the once-friendly family cat. (I will admit that I indulged in a few moments of general worry when a couple in our childbirth class described how they planned to acclimate their two protective Rottweilers to the new baby.) The list of things that can kill your baby is pretty long, because your baby can do only four things – cry, eat, expel what it has eaten, and sometimes sleep – and therefore is not reliably able to keep itself out of danger. Since postpartum hormone levels keep both parents’ danger sensors very much heightened, it can be easy to slip into anxiety brain.

Litigiously paranoid Stuff Manufacturers certainly don’t help: our hand-me-down car seat has a screen printed image of a stick figure baby getting its head smashed in. ITS HEAD SMASHED IN. The infant tub has a huge warning label in four languages – “Child can drown in bathtub!” – that bears evidence of my failed attempts to claw it off with my pregnancy-fortified fingernails. Give me a break, Stuff Manufacturers! I’m not too tired to miss the fact that this fragile, helpless, five-pound-creature is now mine to keep safe for the rest of its life.

I will digress to say that there is no death diagram on the hand me down Johnny Jump Up, a contraption that dangles darling Bean from the top of the doorway by a metal clamp, a series of straps attached to a giant spring, and a large underwear-shaped seat. What could be more dangerous or fun than the Johnny Jump Up? Yet we do not see “WARNING: Child can DIE IN MIDAIR from EXCESSIVE JUMPING!” Kudos to you, makers of Johnny Jump Up, for not sucking all the fun out of baby’s life.

Unfortunately for us in the fight against fear, one of the easiest ways to be a terrified parent is to contemplate sleep. Much of parenthood revolves around sleep, including the moment in which you step away from your judgy-wudgy pre-child self and become one with the universe of parents who choose not to attend a social engagement because…the child is NAPPING. Oh how I chuckle at the young, naive version of myself who thought that having fun was more exciting than having sleep. Once the baby arrives, there is nothing more exciting than having sleep, which is why many parents, despite the dire warnings of All Loud Experts and every daytime newscaster in the last decade, decide to co-sleep with their babies.

Co-sleeping, known by some experts as “the family bed” and by other experts as “the best way to immediately roll over on and kill your baby,” involves laying the baby in your giant grown-up-person bed and then going to sleep next to it. There is a lot of scientific evidence that co-sleeping is not dangerous. There is a lot of cultural evidence that children can and do survive co-sleeping, namely the fact that for most of the history of humankind parents slept with their children in the same bed. When you live in a gher in Mongolia, the baby doesn’t get its own gher a ways down the steppes – the baby sleeps with you so the family can stay warm and protect it from getting trampled by the once-friendly family camel, or whatever irrational fear nomadic Asian mothers suffer.

Obviously you should not co-sleep if you drink, smoke, take drugs or sleep aids, are a seriously heavy sleeper, or are obese. Many of these conditions should also preclude you from driving a car, operating heavy machinery, or using a blender. People like us unintentionally start co-sleeping because it eliminates mom’s need to walk across the house every hour or so to the baby’s room when she’s recovering from childbirth. People like us continue to co-sleep because you get used to snuggling with your new tiny human and not getting out of bed in the wintertime and, as a book I read put it, you become confident in your ability to not sleep through rolling onto a lump the size of a large rock that emanates howls loud enough to raise the dead.

Admitting that you co-sleep is testing the waters with strangers. If they get excited and say “Oh, I did that with my kids, it was awesome!” you experience a hormonal flood of relaxing serotonin because you can add them to your list of people who won’t call child protective services on you. If they respond with the more traditional, “Oh God isn’t that dangerous?,” well, you just revealed too much about yourself. Now you know it’s not worth explaining how easy it is to rinse cloth diapers in your bathtub, or that you don’t even wipe your child’s rear most diaper changes. You learn quickly that the frequent “How’s he sleeping?” question from other mothers often means, “Where’s he sleeping?” which is really just a thinly veiled “You’re going to roll over on your child and suffocate him, aren’t you? AREN’T YOU?!” I found the best response to be “He’s in our bedroom” which means exactly what anyone takes it to mean. Nobody has to know that our bedroom is the size of our bed – literally. My husband bangs his shins off the radiator nightly because if we gave him any more clearance by moving it over, the bedroom door would not shut.

There are, of course, things you can buy to alleviate the guilt you might be feeling about co-sleeping. We would have purchased an official co-sleeper, for example, if our bedroom had been bigger. A co-sleeper is a suspended bassinet, basically a padded shelf with walls on three sides that attaches to your mattress so your baby is at arm’s reach but not in your bed. Co-sleepers remind me of Sonic Drive-In trays that attached to your car door in the days before cars had cup holders, and flat screen TVs. The average co-sleeper looks like it would fit a bag of chips, several jars of salsa, a large salad, and a plate of cookies, so if we had purchased one, I bet Bean would have ended up in our bed anyway. When you’re a new breastfeeding mom, nothing is more satisfying than eating a huge meal in the middle if the night. Except maybe sleeping through it.