The Moments Before Sleep
A storm before the calm.
In the hectic hustle of being a new father, once in a while you get a chance to stop and see life, right in front of you. Roughly every two to three hours, it’s time for Izzy to take a nap. Sometimes she snoozes for thirty minutes, at others she dozes off for hours. Sometimes I can get her to sleep in the car, or strolling around the neighborhood, yet at other times, she gets so tired and energized by life, she resists the urge to rest with every bone in her little, spirited body. In these final moments before sleep arrives, she cries, of course, lunges her body away from me, scowls her face, before tiredness takes over and wins the battle. Then, as I’m bouncing her up and down, swaying from side to side, my arms — once tense — also relax, and slow down. It is the storm before the calm of sleep.
In that moment, the picture above captures her face, right after relenting, right before closing her eyes. In that moment, she is calm, her one arm dropped straight to the ground, her other holding on to me, and her eyes focused, like a laser, into mine. She cannot speak, so this is how she communicates. The moment lasts all but a few seconds, yet in the moment, it feels like forever. My mind races in those few seconds. What is she thinking, feeling? Why does she stare directly at me before closing her eyes? And, then, she eventually slips into sleep, going to another place entirely. I wonder what she dreams about. She’s almost six months. She still fits in my arms, but now she’s started daycare, and it hits me that the number of times I’ll have the privilege to hold her like this and help her take a nap gets smaller by the day. I can’t stop time, so instead, I stop to write down something like this post, so I can capture and remember these few seconds when we lock eyes right before going our separate ways.
