early mornings

It’s been a long, hard pull this month, and we’ve been up a lot in the wee hours, not just contemplating our existential condition. Almost exactly one month ago today, we were having a quiet post-bedtime dinner with friends when G appeared in the doorway, blinking a little against the bright lights. It seems that in one lightning flash all the strategic engineering for not only climbing out of his crib but also for opening the bedroom door had fallen into place. No wonder he looked a little shocked. None of us has been able to recover equilibrium since.

At first, G just seemed bewildered that a couple of simple physical acts could so thoroughly displace his world. We moved his mattress to the floor of his room, and for the first two nights he reluctantly went to sleep there, albeit with many interruptions and a final relocation to our bed. Then he just became enraged.

The crib exodus happened to fall exactly in step with a nasty virus brought home from the garderie that felled both G and me, as well as a ten-day separation from S, who had to go back to the US for a conference. It’s not that G didn’t want to sleep, it’s just that it’s hard to achieve a state of steady regular breathing, let alone unconsciousness, when the world as you know it has completely shifted under your feet (and your mattress), and you’re too small to be able to blow your nose by yourself. There was a lot of screaming. We were both sick and miserable, and I alternated attempts at comfort with desperate fantasies of child abandonment. It got to a point where I would find him leaning against the wall in the hallway, eyes half closed, wailing, “Close your sleepy eyes! Close your sleepy eyes!” It’s a line from a lullaby I sing him, but it punts in well as a cri de coeur. When his eyes were open and he wasn’t wailing, he looked hard at me as if he wanted to do me extreme violence, and often did, hitting me with a force that underlined his frustration that the one person who ought to be able to do something about this was clearly falling down on the job.

Mme. Marron, who with her family graciously hosted us through the worst of the stint, put her hand on my shoulder at one point and said gently, “He’s going to be really interesting to have dinner with in eighteen years. It’s what you have to hold on to.” That and being able to drink again in about six weeks.

In the last week, we’ve achieved a tenuous balance that involves G going to sleep – s-l-o-w-l-y – in his “new” big bed (the single bed from our spare room, tarted up with some splashy IKEA textiles and a stuffed hippo), and then coming in to sleep with us at about 2 am. Our bed, she is very crowded, and no one is really getting what I would call a good night’s rest. Some nights I have taken to just giving up and getting up – it makes me much less grumpy than lying there with eyes wide open. I read, I stare out the window, I rustle around the kitchen – but mostly just enjoy the suspended silence that is the one reward of this fractured schedule.

One of the last few mornings, much to our surprise, Lucy and I actually found ourselves out on the streets at five a.m. I was up because G. was in bed with us, flinging limbs across my rapidly decreasing corner of mattress and banishing me to the study. Lucy was up because I was up; her dim sense of the circadian, whatever they may say about dogs, being completely undone by anyone being out of bed with the lights on. After I had been reading in the study for about half an hour, I heard her heave off the bed and start a restless tap-tap-tap across the bedroom and down the hallway. A couple of minutes later, she poked her head anxiously into the opposite door of the study, her eyes saying, “Hey, Vertical Human, time to get going.” So I pulled on a sweater and jacket over my pajamas and we went out.

And it was a beautiful early morning. I’m not often up at this hour, let alone outside. This time of year (or maybe every time of year, how would I know?) it’s still pitch dark, and in the mists the streetlights look like giant fireflies. You can understand why a thousand ersatz paintings have tried, and failed, to capture the same mysterious effect. At five o’clock the middle of the night is bumping elbows with the crack of dawn – while there weren’t many of us out, we were evenly divided between those just waking up and those just finishing their evening. On the first corner, a man was delivering eggs to the bakery; the next doorway spit out two men with rumpled hair and glasses, papers under their arms. They shook hands and wished each other a bonne fin de nuit.

At the end of the block, I could see a young man and a much older man walking arm in arm, with some difficulty, as if the older man were being supported as they made their way along. As Lucy and I got closer, though, and stepped aside to give them room on the sidewalk, it became clear that it was actually the older man doing the supporting, ramrod straight and impeccably dressed in a camel hair topcoat, cordovan dress shoes, and a cravat – a cravat! – at 5 a.m. The young man, in a black leather jacket, was listing hard, and singing to himself – coming off the end of a long night, I supposed. I hesitated to acknowledge them, from a combination of learned Parisian reserve and the clear the protective anonymity of that time of day. The older man kept his eyes grimly set forward and Lucy and I kept going.

But then, at the end of another turn around the block, punctuated by enthusiastic grate-sniffing and other business, we met them again, coming off the place. This time there was no way to maintain polite ignorance – we had to speak to each other. By this time the young man had stopped singing to himself and was just hanging heavily against his supporter, head down. The older man hesitated briefly, and in that moment it occurred to me that this was no one-off drunken airing out but something of a nightly ritual, the evidence of who knows what hidden sorrow. It was impossible to determine their relationship to each other – friends? lovers? father and son? – but I could feel the weight of it, and its shared sadness, pressing against us in the cold air. I held Lucy to one side and said “Bonjour, monsieur.” He glanced down at my belly and then back up at my eyes. And then, instead of saying anything, he inclined his head and tipped an imaginary hat to me – the most courtly of gestures at the strangest of moments – before walking on.

I don’t know if he was wishing me well against the cold of the morning, or against the whole future of 5 am and the things it might bring. But I hurried home to the warm apartment where my boys were just stirring, waking from a restless night that suddenly seemed easy. And for the millionth time since G was born I wondered how we ever survive, these brittle piles of bones covered with such fragile, fragile skin.