So here I am, buried in the back shelves of the serials section of the local college library. Am I a professor? A graduate student? A library employee? No, although I have been all these things. Today I am a mom, and I am trying to figure out what the hell is going on with my baby monitor. No, it's not broken: it's working just fine. Therein lies the rub.

This little machine has come to dominate me as a parent in a way that I can not explain. It does not, as advertised, calm and comfort me. It does not soothe my fears, nor put me in closer touch with my child or her well-being. Instead, it propels feelings of revulsion and frustration out from my deepest self, second only to those I feel for Brussels sprouts. And it has not let up, even months after Rebecca's birth.

So the cognitive wheels begin to turn. I wonder if the invention is a simple play on the psychology of vulnerable consumer parents. I ruminate if there is something inherent in monitoring that makes it so powerful, a dictatorial force one simultaneously hates and loves. It crosses my mind that I might have an insight now into Communist Russia. And so it goes.

I comb through encyclopedias, dictionaries. Rebecca snoozes contentedly in her front carrier, waking only if I shelve the books too vigorously.

It's surprisingly hard to pin down the evolution of the baby monitor, which further solidifies my antagonism towards the thing. The first medical recommendation for home monitoring occurs in 1972, in the peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics; citations at the United States Patent Office related to baby monitors go back as far as 1973, but are laden with informative phrases like "The receiver includes a plurality of LEDs positioned along the front upper edge of a housing for providing a visual indication of signals received by the receiver." Yikes.

The confusion is explained in part by the fact that baby monitors are simply continuously broadcasting walkie talkies, or radios; and radio technology is old. Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor generally regarded as the father of radio, sent and received his first radio signal in 1895. The first time the human voice was transmitted by radio was 1906. (And if you want to build your own radio-based baby monitor, by the way, the October 1992 volume of Popular Mechanics will be happy to help you with that.)

I finally find the following gold nugget. In 1919, as a present to his wife, an inventive American father rigged up a dictaphone attached to a megaphone in his home. With the dictaphone receiver fastened to the crib and a wire run down to the parlor, writes the reviewer of this miraculous invention, "Mother may go about her housework, while baby will sleep soundly, undisturbed by the noise of the living rooms. Should he waken, however, his demands will be heard instantly throughout the house." So the real precursor to my monitor is a baby screaming at his mother through a megaphone. That sounds about right.

I also look into baby monitors on the Internet, thinking vaguely that someone might have asked these questions already. However, I am soon completely sidetracked by the amazing scope of monitoring technology that is now being marketed. A typical baby store that I investigated stocks twenty—not two, but twenty—utterly different versions of baby monitors.

There are monitors that have two-way communication, and monitors with pagers. There are monitors with under-the-mattress sensory pads that tell you when your baby has not moved for a twenty second period. There are monitors that distinguish for you whether the baby is cooing or crying. There are monitors that vibrate the crib in response to the baby's noises, play back a recording of your voice, project soothing images of moving stars on the wall of the nursery, and have video components with night vision— yes, the same night vision technology currently being used by the US Army in Iraq.

Parents? Who needs parents?

Don't get me wrong, though. I am not exempt from taking advantage of at least one of these handy features. Our own monitor has an intermediary setting called "VOICE ACTIVATION" that has saved our sanity, transitioning us gently from the first nerve-wracking days of unadulterated "ON". In those innocent times, we also made matters worse by determinedly increasing the monitor output to "HIGH" (or "NUCLEAR," as my husband now calls it). Rebecca's every murmur used to send us sprinting to her room, hearts pounding, expecting to find her wracked with bubonic plague.

Now, however, using the magical "VOICE ACTIVATION" feature, the monitor rhythmically clicks on and off, transmitting only the most attention-worthy of her murmurs and cries. In its best moments it sounds as if Rebecca has an infant-sized ham radio clutched in her little fist, activated when she has some important coo or gurgle to impart to us: a tiny truck driver on the road of life.

If only it were always that easy. In the library I also discover that monitors, which share the same frequency as many radio-wave technologies (46-49 megahertz, to be exact), are infamous for picking up an impressive range of non-baby sounds: cellular phone conversations, radio stations, static from passing airplanes, and other baby monitors. A 1995 New Yorker article, for an exotic example, centered on a bemused recounting of a monitor-transmitted cordless phone negotiation with a prostitute.

"What is that?" I shrieked, the first time this startled us awake one night at 3 AM.

My husband squinted blearily at the monitor and listened for a few seconds. "That," he finally replied, "is not Rebecca." And went back to sleep.

He was pleased, I think, to have something--anything-- definitive to say about our daughter, whose newborn weirdnesses had caused us in a weak moment to nickname her "The Alien." The nickname remains appropriate. When the monitor goes berserk I find that I don't actually think it is phone interference. Rather I believe that Rebecca is using the monitor, like E.T., to contact her real parents, who live on Betelgeuse and are far more competent than we are.

Yet in the end, I realize that my revulsion actually has nothing to do with the history of radio, volume adjustments, or inconvenient burblings. The real problem is simply this: the monitor has become the symbol of Rebecca herself-- The Alien. For the monitor, like our baby, is an unfathomable presence. It is a bizarre Pied Piper that has entered our home and ensnared us completely. It calls to us from every room, at every hour, and we, blinking the sleep from our eyes, must heed and obey.

It's more than just annoying. It is our daughter's need on "NUCLEAR": intensified and funneled into a river of sound that reaches into every corner of our existence. And we, as responsible human beings, must take it into every corner, by its little blue handle. There is no running away from it. The monitor ensures that there is no pretending otherwise.

I was the kind of little girl who, during recess, silently squeezed herself between the radiator and the corner of the empty classroom to read a book. I am the kind of woman who can walk comfortably for hours in the woods with not a sound but the birds. And so, as with so many other things as a new mother that I can not control now, I can no longer control my own soundscape: my own silence. This, for me, is something that cuts to the heart of the difficult transition into first-time parenthood.

I remember discussing these things with my mother-in-law when they first started to percolate. She smiled. "When your husband was a baby and snuffling too much for me, I put him in a closet," she said.

Clearly things were simpler back then.

Still, at the end of the long day of the parenting mind, I also remember other things.

In particular, I remember an afternoon nap Rebecca took early on in her little life, allowing her father and me to collapse in our bedroom and pick up long abandoned books for a few furtive pages of reading. Almost immediately, of course, we both fell asleep. But before we did, I found myself listening intently to the stillness of our house.

It seemed I was back in the tranquility of our pre-monitor, pre-baby days. The quiet became a solid, tangible thing, like mist, or a diamond. It hung in the air, empty of what rang in my ears at all other times... from the monitor, in the backyard, in the basement, in the faraway bark of a dog, the pipes in the shower, my dreams: the squeaks and sighs, the sobbing and smiling of my baby daughter.

And I asked myself: Do I want this back?

The answer came. It was not sweet, simple, or wise. It was kind of tired, actually. But it was sincere.

Not for anything in the world.

Dina Strasser is a public school teacher, adjunct graduate professor, and mother of two, Ian (1) and Rebecca (3). She is a former Fulbright Scholar and has been published internationally in the field of education. Her creative nonfiction essay on motherhood, "Tender Mercies," was published in the Spring 2006 edition of Brain,Child magazine.