There are few things worse than having “The Heart of Rock and Roll” stuck in your head at two o’clock in the morning.
Except possibly having this catchy ’80’s ditty replay itself over and over as your child reaches out across the pillow you have erected as a barrier between your bodies because you refuse to cuddle him as he has been repeatedly requesting for the past hour.
It’s the same old story I’ve told before. All seems to be going smoothly with Jake’s ability to sleep through the night in his own bed. Then we go away somewhere — in this case my sister-in-law’s house in West Virginia — and he gets to sleep with us — in this case on a twin futon pushed up against our queen futon, so I could reach over with a reassuring hand every time he cried out in his sleep. His first night at home he sleeps right through and I think all is well. And then.
The crying at one a.m..
When it started, I stumbled to his crib and he grabbed at me in that way that precipitates the full-body cuddle of a half-asleep boy that I love, love, love. Except that I don’t love it quite as much when I know it will make it impossible for me to ever put him back in his crib. Or when I have been roused from my own much-needed sleep to stand, shivering, in his room, squinting into the darkness.
“Does something hurt?” I asked him gently as I rubbed his back but kept his feet firmly on the crib mattress.
These are the new rules. If something hurts — impending incisors cutting their way through tender gums, tummy churning from the rice with black beans on which he chowed so happily at dinner, an aching ear or head or feverish limbs — I pull him to me and sleep next to him all night, happy to provide succor when there is a good reason for it. But if the middle-of-the-night demand is triggered only by the natural (but less than ideal) desire to displace Mike and sleep in bed with me, I must put my foot down.
It’s a tough call, but one with which I felt comfortable. Until last night, when his only response to my queries, my desperate calls for him to tell me something, anything, was wrong so I could carry him back to bed and go to sleep without worrying about instilling any habits I will regret tomorrow night, was, “Come up.”
Apparently, all that was wrong was that he wanted me to hold him.
Which, in the light of day, seems like a worthy reason to ask to be held. But, bladder bursting and feet bare on cold hardwood floors at one o’clock in the morning, this is not a request that merits my sympathy. Instead, it elicited a quick and unsympathetic ride to the bathroom, where I plopped him on the floor wailing while I tended to my own needs and then a similar ride to and plop on the bed just abandoned by Mike. Followed by the whimpering and cries of, “Mommy!” and attempts to breach the pillow barrier between us (designed to show that I had no choice but to put him in my bed but would not make it the pleasant experience for which he was hoping).
As I stuck to my non-cuddling guns — because you really can’t change your program in the middle of the night — and listened to the unwelcome refrains of Huey Lewis and the News, I had an unsettling thought.
What if something really was wrong — a bad dream or indigestion that didn’t register on his literal-minded scale of “Does something hurt?” or being too hot or too cold — that he couldn’t articulate? I imagined him several years hence crying out from the full-sized bed I will wisely buy him so I can lie next to him and comfort him as he recounts his nightmare about the gorilla living in our laundry basket that pushes me out of the car and drives away. (This is an especially vivid one that remains from my own childhood. Believe me, it’s scary at the time.)
Why, I thought uneasily, will Jake get more sympathy precisely when he is more able to explain what it is he needs from me?
Continue reading ‘“Read My Lips . . .” Oh, Wait, You’re Still Learning to Talk’
