The Crib

My problem with Julian is getting worse.

Other parents warned me about this. It happened this morning. Standing over his crib, watching him sleep, I performed the usual ritual — stroke his hair a few moments, listen to him breathe a few more, transfer a kiss from my finger to his temple — then started to back slowly out of his room in time to catch the bus.

At least I thought I had backed up. When I looked down, my feet hadn’t moved. They seemed to be adopting the same attitude they do during pick-up basketball games: Yes, we’re connected to the rest of you. Yes, your brain sends us signals. No, we don’t always feel like listening.

Why Julian insists on torturing his father this way I have no idea. One could argue that it isn’t his fault, but he is the one lying there, after all. And it’s true that he isn’t doing anything but sleeping, but that’s the whole issue. The sleeping is wonderful. The sleeping is mesmerizing. The sleeping is like a drug I can’t shake.

Days like this are hardest, when I don’t know how late I might get home and he could already be in bed. So I continue to stand at his cribside, Stephanie asleep in our room, the house all dim silence, and stare. He lies there in what we have come to call the surrender position — head angled slightly to the side, little arms pistoning out as though celebrating some victory in his sleep — unaware of me, tiny and vulnerable and at the same time so present and substantial. I guess at his thoughts or dreams and tell him how deeply I love him, that I will protect him but allow him to explore life, that I apologize in advance for the mistakes I’m certain to make. I say random things. I chat with this little person, try to convince myself he’s real, but he’s too beautiful to be real. Eventually I give up and go back to just staring.

I glance at my watch. My brain gets more stern with my feet: If the big guy’s going to make it to the office on time, you guys have to make a move, and I mean now.

I lift my foot, but it comes down in the same spot. Just one more minute. Thirty seconds. Just to stroke his hair again, touch his cheek.

I find myself thinking a peculiar kind of nothing. His innocent perfection precludes any kind of the adult thinking my brain has spent 30 years trying to develop. I hear only an awed voice in my head repeating a rhythmic, simple word: Wow. Wow. Wow.

Finally I take that first backward step, then another, and eventually make it out of Julian’s room, depressed when the top of his little head disappears from view.

On the bus, cammed in among the other commuters, I start mentally preparing for my 10 o’clock meeting. This lasts seconds before I start thinking about how my son, my own little son, rode on my shoulders for the first time last night, holding small clumps of hair on either side and peering around from a new perspective, how amused Steph was by the tentative excitement on his face. I think about how his legs couldn’t quite reach all the way around my neck and how I could barely see his chin in the mirror behind the top of my head.

If I can accomplish a few things during the 10 o’clock, eat lunch at my desk and power through the afternoon, maybe I can make it home an hour early. Two, if the boss keeps that flight he’s supposed to be on. But if things don’t work out and Julian’s already in bed when I get home, that’s OK. I’ll just spend some quality time at his cribside, even though he won’t know it.

Not until he’s a father.

Today's Parent 

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I.J. Schecter
43 Park Hill Road
Toronto, ON M6C 3N2
(416) 803-9847

© I.J. Schecter 2003