Beloved children,
When Mom and I were first married, we had a washing machine but no dryer. Whenever we did laundry, clothes would end up hanging on every available surface of the house. We would unfold the ironing board and lay out all our underwear. There would be rocks and paperweights pinning tee shirts to the windowsills. There would be sweaters draped over the kitchen chairs, socks on the shower rod, bras on the doorknobs. We looked like the victims of a laundry bombing.
Mom commented once how funny our situation was, and my response was ridiculously serious: “What’s so funny about it? There are millions of people in the world without dryers.” True enough, I suppose. At the time, it seemed perfectly normal: Without a drying machine, what else was one to do?[1]
But of course, I was missing the point. It was funny. The air smelled of detergent. If guests came over, either they’d see all our laundry on display, or we’d stash away a damp pile in our bedroom. Practical, yes, but funny, too.
Raising the two of you brings about so many practical yet funny ways of life—a very strange “normal” that is perfectly pragmatic in the moment but, with a little distance, downright hilarious.
This phenomenon shines brightest at nighttime. In your first months of sharing a room, your sensitivity to noise turned every square inch of our house into that high-security computer vault from Mission Impossible where the NOC list is stored. For agents Mom and Dad, any inadvertent scrape of the wall had the potential to trip the alarm. My nighttime maneuvers around the house, especially upstairs near your bedroom, became no less intricate than the wire-suspended acrobatics of Ethan Hunt.
The first security measure to bypass was the baby gate. Mom and I had to close it at night when we went to bed, but it made such a loud, metallic click that it could easily compromise the mission. So for months, I would sneak up the stairs, stalk into the bathroom, retrieve a bath towel, and smother the locking mechanism to muffle the click.
If I forgot something downstairs, opening that gate again was out of the question: It was the daddy long-legs step-over for me, one hand on the railing, one hand pressed against the wall, praying that I wouldn’t tumble down the pitch-black stairs.
The next security measure was the landing, a 10-foot patch of carpet connecting your bedroom, the office, our bedroom, and the bathroom. If we got lucky and sister slept through most the night, we had to account for the possibility of brother waking up, seeking out me and Mom, and in the process slamming both bedroom doors and thus rousing sister, too.
To mitigate this risk, our first tactic was to lay a small towel between each door and its frame, to cushion the sound of the closing door. My dear boy, you quickly foiled this plan: Noticing that the door wouldn’t close, you would look down, remove the obstruction, and slam the door anyway. Mission failed. Headquarters had been infiltrated, and the baby sirens went a-wailing.
So we got clever. Instead of placing the towels on the ground, we laid them on top of the door so that you could neither slam the door nor remove the towel.
But then, when should we insert the towel into the door? Should we rig it at bedtime, and allow additional light and sound into your bedroom in the hours before Mom and I went to bed? Or should we leave your door closed at bedtime, then return later to install our dampening mechanism?
We opted for the latter, which meant more ease of mind in the evening but a dangerous mission each night. After getting ready for bed, I would creep toward your door, fold the towel to the correct thickness, and then listen for the right moment. For full sound camouflage, I’d wait for the heater to kick on, and I’d let one lullaby on your sound machine finish and the next one begin.
I’d wrap my hand around the doorknob and start to turn. Never have I been so conscious of the internal workings of a door latch. Each click pinged yellow on my mental decibel meter.
I know what you must be thinking: Dad, you’re a complete psycho. You’re not wrong. In that season of fragile sleep, I went to virtually any length to ensure as much rest as possible. There was a while when, if I had to use the bathroom at night, I would pee in the dark, using nothing but window-filtered moonlight to find my porcelain target. Why? I don’t even know. What difference would the bathroom light make to my children sleeping down the hall? But I was in ninja mode, and ninjas do everything in the dark.
I should note, by the way, that Mom does not and never did share any of these neuroticisms. Much like she shakes her head at my habit of locking the car twelve times “just to be sure,” Mom has given me my due share of teasing over my nighttime antics. When she gets ready for bed, she doesn’t tiptoe up the stairs. She doesn’t close doors like she is cracking a safe. She doesn’t turn on light switches as if she were cutting the red—no, the yellow!—wire.
Even though you sleep mere steps away behind the thin veil of your bedroom door, somehow she manages to act like, well, a normal person. It makes me very nervous.
And by the way, I may be neurotic, but I’m not stupid. Deep down, I know that playing Ethan Hunt makes a negligible difference, if any. I mean, the sound of me opening my dresser drawer two rooms away from yours is not enough to wake you up. If it is, then you were about to wake up, anyway.
Still, I’m hardly the only person in the house acting weird at night.
Like how about that night, my cheeky son, when sister had a dickens of a time getting settled, and as she finally relaxed and I was laying her down, you decided to blurt at top volume, “I AM A ROBOT!” I laugh now, but I didn’t then.
Or how about that early morning when I woke up to find your bedroom door ajar and your bed empty, and when I looked around the house, I found you in the office, drawing pictures on Mom’s computer in Microsoft Paint (a mystery in itself, as we had never shown you how to open or use that program).
Or my darling daughter, how about your strategy, worthy of a PETA flier, where you protest your confinement by scooting to one side of your mattress and dangling your legs between the slats of your crib (as in the photo up above).
Or how about that charming habit that I imagine all children are taught at Parental Tormenting Camp where you come down with a nasty case of insomnia the one night in the whole month when Mom and I have something scheduled after bedtime.
Or how about that routine the two of you coordinated for a while where you slept in shifts, always diligently waking up just as the other got settled back to bed. Some nights I felt like I was trapped inside one of those river-crossing logic puzzles, where the farmer has to get the fox and the goose and a bag of grain to the other side but can only fit one thing on the boat at a time. I don’t like that type of puzzle on paper, and I like it even less when I’m the farmer and I spend more time on the boat shuttling children than I do on shore.
So yes, I may have developed a neurotic habit or two, but can you blame me? If necessity is the mother of invention, desperation is its father.
Do you know what’s even crazier than all these habits and quirks, though? The fact that I am going to miss this stage of life. Sure, I am ready for more regular sleep, and I am happy that you’re both doing a lot better at night now than you were even a month ago. But when again in my life will I get to wake up in the early morning light and see through the crack in my door a sleepy-eyed boy stumbling toward his mom and dad? When will I get to rise with the birds and the sun to take my wide-awake daughter for a run? When again will I get to soothe my little girl back to sleep when she is screaming, screaming, screaming, until the gentle melody in my voice pokes through her armor of fuss and she finally quiets and nestles close? When again will I get to lay next to my boy, holding his hand in silence until he fades to angelic sleep?
Recently there was a night, my son, when you were having an unusually tough time getting to bed. Mom and I had tried every tactic, and you had stalled every way you knew how—books downstairs, books upstairs, water from the bathroom sink, water from the kitchen sink, change your PJs, change them back. We were getting nowhere.
With my last shred of patience, I conceded to just one more of your demands, on condition that you go straight to bed afterward. (On those tough bedtimes, our otherwise sweet routine of stories and cuddles degenerates into a business-like transaction of contracts, clauses, and compromises. Not my favorite.)
I carried you to bed for the umpteenth time and pulled the blanket up to your chest. As I started to stand, your little hand grabbed hold of mine, and you whispered a sentence so true it pierced me, traveling down to that vein of fatherly love deep in my heart: “I want you to be with me.”
I want you to be with me. It doesn’t get more precious than that. How disarming and poetic. In that fiddly, fussy, frustrating moment, it’s like you illustrated to me in seven words what Augustine meant with the great quote: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you.”
My desire for control, for predictability, for good sleep, for me time—sometimes these overshadow the immense privilege it is to be your daddy, to be the one who responds at any hour, the one called either by child’s tantrum or child’s whisper, “Be with me.”
And yes, a privilege, too, to be the one who resorts to stealing the NOC list to keep the house sleeping.
Thinking back on those early days of our marriage without a dryer, I don’t just view them with a laugh. I view them with a smile. One of my favorite photos from that season of life shows the ironing board covered in boxers and tee shirts. The pragmatic becomes funny, and the funny becomes dear.
There may be millions of parents out there—yes, even this very night—trying desperately to get their kids to sleep and keep them there. A year down the line, and those same parents will be looking back and laughing. Ten years later they’ll be saying, “Those were the days, weren’t they?” This parent will be, anyway.
[1] Okay, it’s called clothes lines and laundromats.