Joy in Insomnia

Before anyone thinks I'm being sarcastic, that is the furthest thing from my thoughts. My son is in a stretch where a full night's sleep is something of a rarity and my wife and I, no matter how deeply we manage to sleep still encounter an interruption through the night if our son has a fitful night because of a bad dream and cannot find the comfort of his favorite stuffed puppy.

When he manages to find it, we often awake to him crawling into bed with us, his trek down the hall signalled by the approaching light of the stuffy's nightlight tummy.  If he manages to get that far without waking us we will wake to find him wedged between us and ask one another when he got there.

On just as many nights though we take him back to bed and lay with him until he falls asleep again or until we wake up.  While our son favours having his mother put him down in the evening, he tends to prefer me during the bewitched hours when the dreams and what they stir in the imagination make him a bit more restive or uncertain about the coming of dawn and the more familiar patterns of the day.

Invariably I do my best to settle him down with consoling strokes of his forehead or a gentle hand on the belly and all the unsettling that is going on there when the dreams have awoken him.  For me it is a calm and patient hour of the night when I can be the calm shadow to the grumpier, stricter father of daylight.  I feel myself connecting to him in the quiet of the darkness or the dim nightlight of musical puppy with its renditions of ABC, Twinkle, Twinkle, Brahms' Lullabye or the primal simplicity of a beating heart.  He settles down or asks deep questions that I answer as well as I can.  He yawns with a gape that takes me back when he was a more literal handful of a few months' of age, his profile the perfect enlargement of the form I recall from when he was three or four months old.

I stroke his head again and again as he sentences grow incoherent and I think of my father stroking my head a lifetime ago or him stroking my grandmother's as we bid her farewell two decades ago. And as the breathing slips into its sleepy rhythm that will break in a few hours time with another thrash about the uncertainties that unsteady sleep for him through the night, I stay with him while I can, while he's small enough to spare me that space and vulnerable enough to need someone nearby until morning comes.