It’s after 10:30pm on a Monday night and I should be asleep. Instead, I’m heating a can of tomato rotini soup. The crackle of the gas igniting, the bubbling of the soup coming to a simmer: this is what comfort sounds like. I pour the soup from pot to bowl, leaving just a little in the pot so I can come back for more. I like looking forward to that. Then I sprinkle mozzarella cheese on top and watch the shreds melt into the broth.
I have ennui tonight — the I Can’t Get Started variety. I spent two hours window shopping online for climbing backpacks, another 20 minutes browsing for a TV show to watch, a collective 10 minutes opening and closing the refrigerator and cupboards foraging for something to eat, 15 minutes paging through books looking for something to read.
I’m sitting in bed now, scooping spoonfuls of soup into my mouth, wiping melty strings of cheese from my chin, settled in — finally — with an essay, “In Defense of Saccharine” by Leslie Jamison. Which makes me want to write.
The dog is laying, curled up, at the foot of the bed, and the boy just cried out from the room next door.
He has been doing this a lot more than usual lately: crying. Sometimes excruciating screams in the middle of the night. If it’s just the crying, we wait awhile before we check on him. We spy on him first, from the Dropcam app on our phones.
If it’s the excruciating screams, we rush to him as soon as we can pull up sweatpants and throw on a sweatshirt. He’ll be standing in his crib, white-knuckling the top railing. He’s tall enough, now, to see clearly over it. His face will be wet with rolls of crocodile tears and his nose will blow little globes of tear-snot. His eyes are scrunched and his lips alternate from twist to pout. When I get to the edge of the crib, he reaches up for me. I bend in toward him and lift him as gently and sturdily as I can. I want him to know he’s safe, and that I’m here for him. I lay my palm across the back of his head, coaxing it to my shoulder, squeezing him tightly with my other arm and reassuring him quietly that everything is ok and will be okay. I rock and sway and “shhh” and do all of the things a parent does to make everything better for her baby. I never saw myself doing these things, but here I am, at two in the morning, doing them as naturally as breathing.
Sometimes, after he’s calmed down, we sit in the rocking chair. Back and forth and back and forth. It’s dark and still, save for the occasional squeak of the floor boards and the whir of the sound machine on his nightstand. I can hear him breathing, and he sighs every now and then. Sweet, heavy sighs.
I think about my parents doing this for me when I was a toddler. Rushing to my crib, telling me it would all be okay, rocking me back to sleep, finding the same rhythm, imagining that someday the little girl nestled in their arms snoring peacefully would someday grow up.
— March 23, 2015
