night shift

The baby goes down first: At the appointed time, which is always too early for her taste and fifteen or twenty minutes past my intention, I tuck her in, read her a story, and sing her a song. It was easier in her infancy. Now that she is three years old, she can string a fifteen page story book into a half-hour affair with queries alone. And I’m not entirely convinced any of this is especially soothing; she’s rarely asleep by the time I leave her. But children jealously guard their rituals, and these are the rites of night time.

The second shift is for the older girl. Her room is lit in multicolor Christmas lights, and she emerges from her lower bunk when I knock on her door, with her wide black eyes and fresh nereid beauty. She keeps the night watch, like me; she lies awake and thinks of things that elude her during the day. I’m meant to help her sort these matters, and this is how we spend our time.

One night she told me she dreams about death.

Whose, I asked.

First, she said, my husband’s grandparents, who she has only met once, but even so. And then, she said, my husband’s parents, and then my parents. And then my husband and I.

A certain book on child-rearing I once thumbed through in the laundry room of our old co-op instructed readers to reassure children that, in the event of their parents’ deaths, they would still be taken care of. The basic anxiety had to do less with loss and more with abandonment, this book said.

At the time it had seemed rational. But I found myself hesitating to respond to her as though she were merely anxiously self-interested, when she seemed so logically situated in the facts of her own life. In all likelihood, the order of operations probably will go something like her dreams predict. Being the future comes with the obligation of burying the past.

I told her that I think we will have a very long time together, and that I have a plan for that time. I told her I’m going to use it to teach her everything I know, including how to be a grown-up person with one’s own spouse and children, and that through the progress of this scheme she would be transformed into someone who will be, when faced with my and my husband’s deaths, capable of handling it. You as you are right now will not have to face these things, I told her. By then, you’ll be somebody else, somebody who’s ready.

Of all the ad hoc plans I’ve concocted on the spot to preserve my children’s hearts from fear or disappointment, this one might be the most ambitious. I will have to see it through, which means I’ll have to ensure that I am first transformed, as ready as I have promised she'll be when the wheel of seasons turns and the time has come for me. It twists in my mind's eye as I search for sleep.