Jan

8

At odds

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When Riley was little — maybe three years old? — I agreed to have him participate in a study on bone density. It was this slightly creepy deal where I had to take a class C medication during pregnancy and at the time all the doctors were like, it’s fine! It’s totally fine, don’t worry! And then afterwards a medical group got in touch with me and they were all, oh, that drug you took? Totally fine! But we’re just doing this eentsy beentsy study to see if children’s bones, um, disintegrate when mothers take it. But ha ha ha, it’s FIIIIINE.

Anyway, I’m all in favor of studies that actually provide sound scientific proof behind the whole chorus of IT’S FINE!, so I said sure, and I trundled Riley over to the Seattle Children’s Hospital for an X-ray of his … gosh, I can’t even remember. His hips and legs, I believe.

(Spoiler alert: he was fine! Totally fiiiiine.)

Going to the children’s hospital, though … man. My heart started hammering around in my chest as we headed in and I could see kids here and there who weren’t so fine, children with bald heads and enormous shadowed eyes and children in wheelchairs and jesus, I felt like the world’s biggest asshole, welling up as I walked the halls with my perfectly healthy, chatty toddler.

I remember feeling this great crashing wave of never wanting to take a moment with my children for granted ever again, that if they were healthy and happy that’s all that mattered in the entire world. And then I remember being intensely irritated with Riley all of half an hour later, as he pickily hemmed and hawed over the little box of toys that the X-ray lady offered him as a prize for holding still during the scan. “Hurry up,” I hissed at him, mortified at his greediness.

I don’t really have a point here, other than I was thinking about perspective lately, and how slippery it is to hold onto. I bitched and moaned mightily about how long this winter break from school has been, then I blinked back tears as Riley climbed on the bus this morning. Last night I couldn’t wait for the kids to go to bed, then I sat on the couch and read someone’s blog post about their children approaching the teen years and how hard things are getting, and I ran back into my boys’ bedrooms to kiss their confused, sleepy faces. And on it goes — I have a thousand examples. Christ, a BILLION. I’m sure you do too.

It’s sort of ridiculous, isn’t it? How parenting so often makes you feel as though you’re not feeling the right thing at the right time.

Jan

3

The Sleep of the Parents

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Even when Dylan stopped waking up at night to cry lustily every few hours — a stage I thought was never, ever going to end, by the way — he was what you might call a difficult sleeper. It wasn’t until he was maybe three years old that I could be reasonably certain he’d sleep through the night, and even then it was sort of a crapshoot. Even now, actually. He’s almost five, and he often wakes up late at night with a sort of confused, blurry sound of increasing frustration, and when you go in there to see what’s the matter, he can’t say. I once overheard him talking to Riley about a dream he’d had, which he described, darkly, as “I was going swimming but I had all my clothes on,” so I suspect he’s still having bad dreams on a regular basis. Thankfully, they aren’t the utterly awful-looking night terrors they used to be (a toddler having a night terror is a deeply fucked up thing to observe, as I’m sure some of you know first-hand), and he certainly doesn’t seem bothered by them, but his wake ups happen frequently enough that I lie there, every night, with one ear humming like an amateur radio antenna.

Have you read Catherine Newman’s Waiting for Birdy? I really cannot recommend it enough, without maybe grasping the front of your shirt, yanking you close, and hissing in your face that EVERY WORD OF IT IS TRUTH AND BEAUTY AND JESUS JUST READ IT, but anyway, I particularly love this line of hers about sleep:

Nothing can prepare you for the Sleep of the Parents. If sleep is an ocean, then I used to sleep on the floor of it, a sunken thing among the catfish, bubbles blooping from my dreaming mouth towards the surface. Now I sleep in a little rowboat. In a thunderstorm, during a war, with cannons going off all night long. And also sharks.

God, yes. Sleep seems to have changed forever and ever for me, even though my children are no longer tiny diapered poop-monsters constantly going off like squalling alarm clocks. I jerk and twitch at every sound, despite the earplugs I so dutifully squish into place each evening before turning off my light. Dylan’s occasional dream-murmurs, a gunshot-loud cough from Riley: I float all night from huh? to whew, back and forth in Catherine’s rowboat.

The kids have spent the last two nights with their grandparents, and it’s been a wonderful little break to jump in the car and see a movie (we went to Django Unchained one night and Life of Pi the next, and I loved them both) or go out for dinner or simply relax in the living room without hearing two demented hooligans racing back and forth making that awful GI Joe laser sound, somehow even more annoying than the more sibilant gun noises (pzzzew pzzzew pzzzew!), but maybe the best part has been the sleep. The peaceful, startle-free, guarantee of it.

So, tell me, parents of older kids. Does the roiling war-torn Sleep of the Parents ever change? Or is that the forever of it: the nightly business of ear-craning, breath-checking, and jolting-awake-at-3-AM-because-someone-cleared-their-throat?

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