Night moves
I'm sleeping in a swamp with the crickets, the frogs, the night insects making their lousy music. The deep coughs. The surface coughs, drips down the throat that won’t let up. The whispers, sometimes waking, sometimes from a dream (“I’m the flying Dutchman.” or “No, I don’t want to eat that.” ). Snores from the other side of the bed, sonorous, melodic, never-ending.
Then: lovely silence. So lovely that I wake up in surprise. I went back to sleep! The bed is still. Nick, curled against my calves, purrs joyfully. I am about to drift back again myself, am just about there, when two feet, solid fleshy anvils, kick against the small of my back. Insistent toes probe the waistband of my bedtime boxers. It is back to the relentless exploration of sleeping feet. I push the feet back to the middle of the bed. They return. Push. Return. Push. Return, this time with less vitriol, like they’ve gotten my point. Awake, I stare at the ceiling. I glance at the clock. 4:35 a.m. is not too early to get up.
After hearing ad nauseam about my sleeping issues, many of them apparently caused by nighttime proximity to a small, loud, kickboxing child, readers may wonder why this kid is still allowed in the bed. I am beginning to wonder the same thing.
The little guy has been there since the beginning, since our first nights home from the hospital. He takes comfort in closeness. When he is healthy, the sleeping is better, although I often wake up when he gets into our bed. I don’t have the heart to stop it, keep on reminding myself that this is temporary, that we are providing a solid base of love for him, love and comfort and support. Who knows if I could sleep normally again anyway?
I never went into my mother’s room when I was little, though I do remember crawling into my grandmother’s bed the year I lived with her, getting warm on chilly snowy mornings, listening for school closings on the radio. I spent many of my childhood nights terrified, my head hidden under the pillow, the pillow hidden under blankets, with a small breathing hole near my nose. Asthma attacks? The sudden onset of a stomach virus with epic vomiting? Night terrors? I stayed in my own bed.
When I was three and my mother and I were living with a man named John, she had a paper delivery route that required leaving the house in the middle of the night. Sometimes John would go with her and I would be left in our apartment alone, presumably sleeping. Sometimes John would stay. Knowing the waking patterns of small children, I must have woken up in that empty apartment on occasion. Once I did wake up when John was there. Something happened. I had a fit or was disobedient. He spanked me with a spatula, left red marks on my backside. My mother was livid.
What was she supposed to do? She was young and poor and had a child to support. Our life was what it was and she was who she was. Still, I often think my hands-on, intense, ignore-your-own needs parenting style is in part a reaction to my childhood. It’s hard for me to tell where to draw the boundaries. I focus on kindness and the desire to provide a solid framework of support and love to the detriment of myself and my relationship with my husband.
So I wake up to a chorus of night sounds. I am blanketed with kicks, with tossed limbs. The boy cuddles against me, reaches out to stroke my belly. I change sleeping venues, move to the boy’s room or go downstairs. When my husband is out of town or sleeping off his illness in another room, I switch sides of the bed, enjoy the moments of aloneness until the boy edges his way next to me again. I remember that all this is temporary, am grateful that at least the boy is in his own bed for a chunk of the night, tell myself that I can always sleep when I’m dead.
Image: In the beginning. The boy and my husband sleeping in mid-2005.
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