fretting forty winks

These past five months of my life [holy crap -it’s been five months?!] have leaned heavily on the learning center of my brain, more so than early childhood, high-school, college or even marriage. I've not only had to learn a bucket-full of new tricks and devices, I’ve also had to re-learn, or un-learn a lifetime of others. And now I have to remember those early childhood years all over again as best possible [those of you who have had experience with my memory know this is a ridiculous challenge for me] so that my son after a lecture from his father doesn’t have to say silently within his head: Make sure you remember what it’s like to be a kid when you’ve grown up, Ben, because it seems dad’s lost all touch with his own childhood. Anna once introduced me to a quote painted on a refrigerator magnet to which I have tried to align my life: You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’d know that one of my most important lessons has involved sleep management. Anna and I have had the fortune lately to sleep in great stretches because a handful of wonderful, beautiful, outstanding, praise-worthy, fabulous, superb, amazing souls reminded us that sometimes you just need to let that poor boy cry himself to sleep. Well, I’ll be darned, but after two or three nights of stressed-out, worried, on-the-verge-of-caving parents at 7:00 pm and two-thirty, our tough little guy now sleeps from 6:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m. without a peep, thump, grshhhhh, or two-thirty. Whoa! Holy-moly! Yee-hoo! F*** Yeah! Boo-ya! The three of us are so much happier now that sleep has been re-introduced into our wilting lives. Ben is continually in high spirits, Anna has lost something like 32 pounds of stress, and me, well, I’m still fat. But at least now I’m well-rested and fat. Like that other refrigerator magnet says: you gotta take things one at a time.

Anyway, on to the point of this blog: children are a welcome worry. I’m sure that’s been said one way or another, one million times or more, which doesn’t make it any less accurate. I tend to worry about a lot of things, probably more so than my poor arteries would prefer [keep up the good work guys], so it didn’t surprise me that I would spend a lot more of my time on the worry-wagon once Ben was born. I understand this is normal. But it’s a whole new kind of worry for me. I wake up in the middle of the night worrying whether he is suffocating in his sleep, or if his feet are too cold. And, like so many parents before me, I drag my self half-awake into his room and make sure he’s still breathing with my palm on his chest or my finger poking his arm until he stirs, which only risks interrupting his siesta and in turn prolonging my own wakefulness. When Anna and I were letting him cry-it-out one fine two-thirty about a week ago, we would lay awake and listen to him slowly wind down, his cries turning intermittent so that he would sob for a minute, then sleep for a minute, then sob, sleep, sob, etc. Well, for those of you who remember those sleep breaks can be maddeningly worrisome! What if he’s cried himself breathless?! What if he’s suffocating underneath his blanket?! What if he’s rolled over onto his tummy and can’t turn his head to breathe?! What if he’s been kidnapped?! What if he’s turned into a liberal?! AAAAHHHHHH! I have to go check on him! I have to--- I have to--- oh, wait, he’s crying again. Whew! After a bit, I seriously thought that it was better when he was crying!

And I’ll continue to worry about him, I am told, until the day I make it out of this world. And I don’t mind. It’s welcome. If there is anything worth worrying about, it’s family, especially when you have a family of your own. I don’t mind worrying about my son [it’s still so cool to say that I have a son] because it’s my own little way of staying grateful. And I am grateful, of course unless he turns out to be a politician, or a Packers fan, or a soccer player, in which case I’ll just be mildly appreciative.

Thanks, God. In case I haven’t mentioned it in a while. . .