Beloved daughter,
As you know, most of the things I write to you don’t end up on this website. More often, Mom and I pen our reflections in a journal that we will give to you much later in life. Last week I went to log a note about your recent sleep habits, and as I scanned over the previous pages, I noticed that it would be the third entry in a row about your sleep.
Well that is odd, I thought. I mean, sure you sleep a lot, and it’s true that in these first few months, I have spent many hours singing and shushing and dancing you to sleep. But there are so many other worthwhile moments. How come in an entire month—one-sixth of your existence, mind you—I hadn’t tried to put to words your incredible laugh, or where we had gone on family outings, or what clothes you were wearing, or how you smile at your brother, or even just the go-to subject of your amazing cuteness?
As I thought about it, I realized that it’s not just my preoccupation with your sleep that is odd; it’s that I often write these letters at odd hours, when I am at my sleepiest. I began writing this very letter one night at 4 a.m., perched on the edge of the bed waiting for you to finish nursing with Mom before putting you back in your bassinet. (I might have been tied up feeding you myself, but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, you have an inborn revulsion to the bottle.)
Two of the first five letters I posted to this site were about nighttime interactions I had with your brother, and since he was born, the bulk of my writing ideas have come to me in the quiet, dark, desperately tired moments of the night. What is with that?
Perhaps I am just participating in that long tradition of the writer’s love affair with the nocturnal. Flashes of inspiration are often said to strike in the middle of the night, temporarily immunizing the artist from sleepiness, jolting them awake with the brilliance of an idea. Kerouac couldn’t have punched out On the Road in three weeks without a few short nights.
When I graduated high school, my English teacher gave me a book of creative writing exercises called The 3 A.M. Epiphany, thus titled on the premise that creativity comes knocking in strange ways and at strange times. In music, there is a type of composition all its own called the “nocturne,” a piece that evokes the night. Chopin famously wrote 21 of them; I wonder if he was raising small children at the time.
But here’s the thing: before you and your brother, I never used to be a nighttime writer. Pre-parenthood, I enjoyed my sleep immensely—took it for granted, I now realize. Other than my years in the pressure cooker of college, rarely have I interfered with my sleep in order to write. There must be more to my fascination with sleep and sleeplessness than a creative impulse.
After all, it isn’t creativity that wakes me up at random hours of the night. It’s you, my needful, fussing, routine-defying, best-laid-plans-be-damned baby. And to be honest, when your cries puncture the still of night like a fire alarm in a symphony, I don’t leap out of bed brimming with inspiration. I flop out, bleary-eyed. I exhale sharply as would a hiker who’s just labored uphill only to arrive at a false summit. Sometimes I mutter something terribly mature and sincere like “Oh great!” or “You gotta be kidding me,” as if my protestations could somehow show you how silly and unreasonable it is for you to be awake. Contrary to the serene Hallmark image of a purring, rosy-cheeked baby nestled into the warm chest of a sweetly smiling daddy, sometimes you end up being rocked back to sleep by a whiny, delirious man more preoccupied with his own rest than yours.
In a twisted way, perhaps that is the reason that I fixate on sleep and sleeplessness, the reason that sometimes I am crazy enough to stay awake to write even after I have won the battle of the wills to get you back to bed: in these moments, rather than feel inspired, I am just the opposite. I am exhausted, depleted, raw. And though such a state isn’t perhaps ideal for artistry, there is nonetheless something profound and compelling about the experience, physically, emotionally, even spiritually.
In one of my favorite recent songs, “The Mother,” Brandi Carlile says of her baby daughter, “The first things that she took from me were selfishness and sleep.” What a perfect line. Right alongside the beautiful love and care and selflessness that parenthood demands is deprivation, sacrifice—indeed an element of suffering.
I’d go one step further: love and this element of suffering are not just side by side but inseparable, necessary even. If you were giggles and cuddles all day every day, any old oaf would be happy to care for you. When your brother was a baby, Mom would somewhat scoff when people commented on “what a good baby” he was, because all they really meant is that he didn’t cause a scene. He was quiet, out of the way; he required little. If he was drooling and screaming and leaking out of his diaper onto their sweater and they still said, “What a good baby,” then I’d start to suspect that they might really, truly love him.
And in that way, whereas I normally am reminded of the Father as I reflect on our life together, when it comes to sleep, I am reminded of the Son. For the picture we have of the Son is of a man totally spent, a man at his most exhausted, his most depleted, at his rawest. We see glorious omnipotent God Himself brought down to clothe himself as an infant among barn animals. We see a man denying himself, leading a life of poverty and homelessness. We see a man with hands weathered by work and face drawn thin with hunger. We see a man washing dirty feet, touching leprous skin, mending crippled limbs. We see a man pacing in the middle of the night, sleep-deprived, lonely, and tortured. In the clearest, most lasting image, we see a man suffering, literally dying for the sake of his beloved.
To meditate on this kind of love is to meditate on suffering. There is no parsing the two. There is no pretending you can accomplish one without the other.
Returning to my pedestrian, itty-bitty lowercase “s” suffering at 3 in the morning, do I think that my sleeplessness is extraordinary? Do I think it is anything nearing the scale of what Christ endured out of love for us? Of course not. Compared to Christ, my suffering is tiny, my love puny. Still, there is something of the same nature in them. A drop of salt water and the ocean are not the same thing, but they are the same stuff.
I suppose that is what keeps me up at night—on one level you, my daughter in need, but on another level nothing less than the stuff of Christ, the lover, the sufferer.
Lest I leave off on a note of utter gloom and lead you to believe that my main experience of parenting is suffering, I should be quick to add that love is not all suffering. If it were, love would hardly be lovely, would it. No one would choose to love; we wouldn’t be drawn to it. Brandi Carlile would stop her song at the loss of self and sleep and never get to lines like “You’re nothing short of magical and beautiful to me.” Parenting would stop at labor and never get to birth.
No, my deprivation, my frustration, my fatigue, my futility—they are mere bits of food stuck in my teeth during a fine meal: annoying in the moment, but forgotten quickly when I think back on the feast.
For with you and your brother, the moments of suffering are far outweighed by moments of laughter and delight, and always followed by tremendous sweetness. No matter the lateness of the hour, I am rewarded, eventually, one way or the other, with that Hallmark scene: a tiny child pressed against my chest or curled up in my arms. In contrast to the tumult of your (and my) fussiness, once you have surrendered to sleep, I get to relish a closeness and quietness, a gentle peace, that only a cared for baby can provide. I’d say that is worth a journal entry or two.