The mercury hovered in the nineties here in New York this week, and a low fever also appeared to burn aboard the Dadwagon. Nathan’s post about the cruelty of informed consent was the chief source of heat, centering as it did on the ever-burning issue of abortion. Theodore had something to say about unsolicited angry advice. Christopher got worked up about the prospect of raising a nasty adult (in a post that Nathan swiftly rebutted). Only Matt was in a relatively Zen state of mind, shrugging off the question of whether to have another kid. (It’s probably because he’s in Morocco, eating dates and spiced lamb and couscous and deducting the whole shmear from his taxes as a work expense.)
At least we had some uncomplicated friendly moments too. Most significant, Theodore happily announced a major life event, and displayed an uncharacteristically Erma Bombeck side to his taste in comedy. Nathan got a little gooey (despite some reservations) about his daughter’s playing soccer. And Christopher managed to find his entire existence summed up in a single-panel stick-figure cartoon.
Stay cool, folks. More next week. Till then, dream of demon sheep.
Nico, just over 2 years old, had a nightmare last night. Midnight, house asleep, everything humid, all windows open, everywhere dark, and suddenly three screams in a row, a repetition of words I didn’t understand until the the next morning.
I have several fixed roles in the family. I often cook, even more often clean the kitchen. A garbage bag would have to grow legs and walk itself to the trash if I didn’t take it out (this has come close to happening a few times). But my most consistent job is nightmare patrol. My wife usually wakes for work between 5:15 and 6 am (a different kind of nightmare), so it’s me who answers the sudden howling, whimpering, jabbering or sobbing. Another reason it’s me: They like seeing my wife a little more than they like seeing me. If screaming at midnight was a reliable way to get their mom into the room, our home would sound like the Broadmoor insane asylum every night of the week.
My job as dream patroller has give me an amateur fascination with just what films are playing behind those closed eyes while my children sleep. It’s not the kind of urgent obsession I used to have when they were infants, when their refusal to sleep at night made me a worse human being during the day. But although less disruptive, their sleep is still utterly foreign to me.
I also know this about my kids: Their sleep, at every stage of development, gets hijacked by other priorities. As newborns, their need to be fed and changed trumped it. When they were infants, they needed to be comforted and held more, it seemed, than they needed to rest. Now that Nico is a toddler, I see that the biggest impediment to sleep may be his imagination.
Part of this, of course, is that the lines that delineate REM and non-REM sleep are a little blurry in children. Non-REM sleep is important: it restores us physically. But REM sleep, where we dream, is what makes us human (or perhaps not just human–reptiles don’t have REM sleep, mammals do). The blurriness is that children’s brains don’t always immediately kick in the paralysis that should be part of REM sleep (so we don’t act out our dreams). So dreaming is a more physical event, as far as I can tell, for them than it is for me.
Back to the question: what does Nico see when he sleeps? I always thought that a narrative would have to be somewhat complex and powerful to inspire the kind of deep emotion that would wake him up in terror. But his storytelling, like his speaking, is pretty basic. He’ll take one plastic dinosaur and make it say ‘hi’ to another plastic dinosaur. And then he seems content to leave it at that. Unless his nightmare is that the other dinosaur doesn’t say ‘hi’ back, it’s hard to imagine that a story is freaking him out.
The one clue to last night’s nightmare: the words he woke up screaming were, I realized this morning, “I’m ready”. That is what he cries out when he’s been put in time out, as an answer to our (probably insufferable) question “are you ready to stop hitting/spitting/crying/misbehaving?” So maybe that’s the answer. His nightmares aren’t elaborate D&D scenarios with half-eaten elves or oceans on fire; they’re probably not even low-budget glowing-eyed demon sheep. Rather, they seem to be domestic dramas about misbehavior, conflict, disappointment and abandonment.
If that is the case, then it’s simple: Our children have same nightmares about us that we have about them.
To tell you the truth, I’m surprised we’re even having this discussion, because I was somehow under the impression that all the Men of Dadwagon (and, more important, the Women of Dadwagon) were through with childbearing. Until Theodore told us his happy news, that is. I have to figure that next Matt is going to tell us he’s afraid of flying and faked all his travel writing, and Nathan will announce that he’s actually a cyborg.
Well, my wife and I are finished. Barring a big surprise, we’re sticking. That was the plan from the beginning, and despite the fact that we have the Best Baby Ever ™, we’re not interested in starting from scratch a second time. Our reasons are simple, and will likely make sense to everyone who lives in a dense expensive city: We don’t have another bedroom, we can barely shoulder the childcare costs as it is, and both of us are in demanding employment that feels a little precarious these past couple of years. On top of that, I have a book manuscript due in fourteen months, and then there’s this sweet, sweet fantastically high-paying blogging gig I’m keeping up, too. The resources are, pretty much, all in use.
And speaking of resources, how about the natural ones? We are both believers in the small-footprint, city-dwelling, car-culture-eschewing Bill McKibben “maybe one” argument.
Besides, how the hell do you people chase two of these little people? Or more? One’s got us completely worn out.
As I say, it’s a familiar story around here. New York (the magazine) has called New York (the city) “the Only-Child Capital of America.” Thirty percent of families here stop at one kid. Time, this week, tells us that the stereotype of only children–that they’re loners, selfish, a little damaged–is bunk. (I plan to quote only the employers of DadWagon editors throughout this post, in case you were wondering.) Turns out that they are just fine, many becoming high-achieving, contributing members of society. All that early attention just makes ’em better adjusted and more confident, apparently.
Our son’s only-child status does mean that my wife and I think a lot about making sure he has enough playmates and friends. We make efforts to see his cousins as often as we can, and one of the reasons we chose daycare over a sitter was to give him lots of time around other children. For what it’s worth, we believe that’s working. Neither my wife nor I is particularly extroverted; we are quiet people, and big social events, while not flat-out scary, demand that both of us steel ourselves a bit from within. Yet our kid loves people, and seems to thrive on social interaction. He chats with (or at least engages the gaze of, and babbles to) bus drivers, waiters, random ladies in the park. He has chatted more with our building’s doorman during the past three months than I did in the preceding thirteen years. You never know at this point, of course, but our gut feeling is that he’s better-adjusted than his parents, which is really all we can ask for.
Also, a word to my colleagues: If you do add to your household, you better hope he doesn’t discover himself called “another goddamn kid” in our archives.
