I have an awful habit when I’ve turned out the lights and I’m lying there exhausted after a long day of chasing you and cooking for you and dashing off work emails and scraping bits of oatmeal off the floor, and it feels so delicious to be wrapped in a blanket in a darkened room, sinking into the mattress. Even as consciousness slips away, a tide rises within me and suddenly it’s at my neck and I’m gasping with an urgent need to protect you. To fold myself around you. To snuff out with my person all gaps between you and a menacing world. Gradually alertness returns and with it a mundane to-do list: I keep forgetting to check the pressure gauge on the fire extinguisher. I’ve got to take my time strapping you in the car seat. I picture myself slowly, methodically pulling the harness taut against your chest. I reflect on the two hazardous objects that made it into your hands today when I wasn’t looking—an acorn, a fallen refrigerator magnet.
I don’t so much fall asleep as fight my way to sleep, a nightly grappling match between an overtired body and an overactive mind. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy described one of his characters becoming a father: “There was nothing cheerful and joyous in the feeling; on the contrary, it was a new torture of apprehension. It was the consciousness of a new sphere of liability to pain.” I understood the bargain I made when I had a baby, even anticipated this maddening midnight ritual, but I plunged ahead anyway and now I’m like Bill Murray waking up in Groundhog Day only on the other end of it and not getting better with practice.
I could read a boring book. Medidate. But such exercises require more fortitude than I can usually muster at that hour. Best to let the beast run rampant—Why oh why didn’t I spend more time today with my lips pressed against your head?—than to chase it around hurling a rope at its neck. God knows I don’t have the energy to turn on the lamp.
Tonight is better than most, though. Tonight through some random firing of neurons I’ve remembered an 8-second video snippet recorded yesterday and now playing on loop in my brain. You’re on the carousel at the zoo, perched astride a plastic tiger. Of course I had to hold you in place, so your face is too close to the camera and slightly out of focus. But the look in your eyes is clear, one of sheer wonder at the world—at this strange, twinkling journey up and down and around. Your lips part as if whispering “wow,” though that word is not yet in your repertoire, and the most striking thing about your eyes, I can see now, is not the wonder but the total lack of fear as you are borne along. So different from your mother who lies here racked with worry.
A smile crosses my lips as I think of those brave eyes. Tonight that’s all it takes: one smile to tip the scales and send a cascade of endorphins through my weary limbs. My stomach unclenches. My breathing slows. I am imbued to the fingertips with—if not your same courage, then a momentary peace in knowing that is how you face the world. My sweet boy, I’m so glad to be the one holding you on that plastic tiger. Up and down, around and around. Up and down, around and around . . .