I woke up thinking of Tillie Olsen. She was an American writer, associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists, best known for her collection of four short stories Tell Me a Riddle, a staple of college and university literature curricula in the United States.

But it's not exactly Olsen's career that haunts me this morning. Someone once told me she wrote with one hand, holding her child with the other. Part of me thinks no woman should have to do that, but another part finds it encouraging, because I'll be doing a lot of holding in the weeks to come.

My daughter, Rada, was born September 24. I asked that they bring her to me as soon as I had settled in my room and insisted she stay there until we could go home. For the next three days, my roommate watched quietly as I let Rada fall asleep in bed with me, picked her up from her crib at the first signs of a cry, and paced the room with her snuggled up to my chest.

"You're going to get her used to that," my roommate finally said. "Don't spoil her. Let her cry, it's good for her lungs." Such advice is common.

Let me get this right: I'm supposed to engage in a will-to-will power game with a three-day-old baby in order to prove to her that I am in charge (which I'm not). My own mother takes two weeks off so she can nurture me after the delivery (a healthy and natural one at that) and through my first days with my newborn, but being just as available to my daughter is going to turn her into a spoiled brat.

You see, this tiny creature, for whom the experience of being born must be at least as stressful as the experience of giving birth, is trying to manipulate me into submissiveness. I'm to believe that if she's fed, dry, neither cold nor hot, she has no real reason to cry. Is that true for you?

Cultural anthropologists have noted that in Native American tribes where the baby is literally inseparable from the mother's body until the child begins to walk, baby colic is an unfamiliar phenomenon. These babies don't cry, don't strain their bodies, don't go through "the terrible twos", have no fear of abandonment. It turns out that, across cultures, babies whose needs have been answered during the first months of their lives grow up more confident and independent those whose cries go unanswered lest they be spoiled or grow too dependent on their mothers.

So I've got my sling handy. Call it surrender, I call it nature.