Night Vigil

Punchy gray clouds and the branches stark, just a few leaves left clinging.  I was admiring the thin purple veins at your temple yesterday, the way they resemble spindly twigs against the sky of your skull.  You bring your hands together now, folded and clasped and then wedged in your mouth, drool slicking the wrinkles of your knuckles and saturating the bib area of your shirt.  You haven't been talking as much the last few days; instead, you seem intent on trying to smell your toes.  When I lean you back against my thighs you pull yourself forward in a tummy crunch that puts Jane Fonda to shame, leaning forward further and further until, if I didn't stop you, you would become a tumbleweed, rolling end over end into oblivion.

We've tried a couple naps in the crib, tried a couple naps with your arms unswaddled.  Varying degrees of success.  Your head is huge.  It is a round house with many floors and a poor design.  Your crown is the widest part but the second level, housing eyebrows, eyes, and nose, is steadily increasing in size mostly due to the plumping of your cheeks.  Your cheeks hang like pillows on the clothesline, sagging above the lowest floor, your mouth and chin, recessed and a little pointy.  It occurs to me that you resemble a dreidel.  And now that you're big enough to sit in your exersaucer, your sister can spin you, although we'll try to dissuade her from using you as a gambling tool.

You tend to have a number of good days of sleep (only waking up once or twice) followed by a couple miserable days (three wake ups).  Unfortunately, this last week your miserable days coincided with two nights on which your sister also woke, first because she peed the bed (through her pull-up; thanks Pampers!) and then because of a hacking cough. 

Nights are strange, in part because I can never entirely remember what happened the following day.  I will remember pulling pink Hello Kitty sheets off your sister's bed, or touching the strands of hair glued to her cheek from snot.  I remember lifting you from the bassinet, the tear of velcro on the swaddle, rewinding your arms, rocking in and out of consciousness.  But sometimes I don't remember correctly at all.  On Thursday morning I was certain you'd woken twice in the night, but when I touched my hugely full left breast it was clear you'd only woken once.

We are part of the world of insomniacs and somnambulists, of bakers and midwives.  We are needles piercing the dark fabric of the night. 

I pray more often these days.  Maybe because you are so new and vulnerable and seem in need of extra spiritual sustenance.  Maybe it's because of the string of deaths this fall, the abundance of grief.  Most of all, though, I think it's because I have this time with you in the darkness.  I tend to whine about the additional chaos created in our house since your birth, the seeming never-ending penny-whistle screams and cackles and exclamations of need and headboard thumping (your sister, not your parents).  But there is more stillness too, these moments nursing you where I'd like to lean fully into sleep but instead am held back, where I linger with you in this place of blurry quiet. Then they come.

Jim and Jennifer and Maggie's husband and Milton and Popo and George and Graham and those who miss them; my friends who have sick parents or have to undergo tests or painful procedures themselves; those who are growing new life or grieving the absence of life; those who are on the cusp of finishing books or dissertations and those who are mourning the absence of work that moves them; those who are contemplating moves across the country and those who are facing the difficulty of learning to love where they are.

And oddly, whereas during the day my efforts to help seem insufficient, whereas I'm hyper-aware of everything I am failing to do (the notes I should write, the meals I should bring, the word of comfort I should offer) at night, in these rocking pockets of quiet, letting those I love pass in and out, this feels like enough.

I am holding you, Matteus, and we are holding all of them.