Stillness

It’s an unwritten rule of motherhood that you are allowed to ascribe every public display of poor behaviour to teething until the last of the child’s second set of molars has come in.  I don’t know if you knew that.  I had thus attributed all of Willan’s whining and clinginess of the past few days to the last of those torturous teeth.  They are taking months to come in.  They break through and then disappear again beneath his swollen gums and then break through again, causing lots of misery, usually in front of company.  I was therefore taken by surprise when he sat at the dinner table recently and projectile-vomited right past his parmesan pasta.

My little one had the stomach flu.

A few hours later, when the worst of it had passed and he managed to keep down some sips of flat gingerale, I cuddled him on the couch until he fell asleep.  I relished this change from our usual bedtime routine which has become such a complicated, often frustrating bit of absurdist theatre.  We always put both of the kids to bed at the same time.  Grayson falls asleep within minutes and stays that way every night until his digital clock reads seven zero zero at which time he is allowed to come in to our room and crawl into bed.  He has been a fantastic sleeper since he was six months old. We naturally took all the credit for this bit of good fortune using a simple equation wherein bad behaviour equals teeth or lack of sleep and good behaviour equals good parenting or excellent genes (mainly from me).  Willan, however, doesn’t like going to bed and never has.  He receives a mysterious jolt of energy when the lights go out.  Or maybe it’s something in his toothpaste.  Whatever it is, he has turned our bedtime “routine” into his own personal joke.  Geoff and I tuck our boys in, leave a light on in the hallway, and creep downstairs.  We then spend the next hour or so enjoying our time alone while trying to ignore all of the ominous sounds of possible destruction coming from the top of the stairs.  When we eventually head upstairs ourselves, we inevitably find Willan tucked into his own bed fast asleep, looking as wonderfully innocent as all sleeping children do.  We then survey the damage in all of its creative forms.  Sometimes this damage is simply a matter of things we can no longer find: my contact case emptied out and poured down the drain, my glasses at the bottom of a basket of towels, earplugs lost forever.  Sometimes it is more a matter of what can be found at the bottom of the laundry chute:  the contents of an entire toilet paper roll, the pages from our favourite children’s books, a wet and dripping toilet brush.  Sometimes it’s more a matter of what he’s wearing: he can be completely naked or wearing different pyjamas from the ones he was in when we put him to bed.  We have found him wearing his father’s underwear and, once, his flotation swimming suit on backwards over Grayson’s pyjamas.  Sometimes, he gets really creative: an entire box of bandaids stuck to the wall of the bathroom, pictures scrawled across the bathroom walls and over my bedding in bright blue toothpaste, and, once, dozens of new photographs taken on my cellphone, several of them close-ups of the water inside the toilet bowl.  Always, there is the matter of what I find in my bed when I pull back the covers: books, teddy bears, trains, or tiny Lego men.  When I find these little gifts under my blankets, I am acutely aware of how soon this stage will pass.  One day, I will come to bed and there will be nothing there for me to find, none of this sweet evidence that he has sought the comfort of my pillow for a little while before heading off to his own.

I am trying very hard at the moment to keep up with life and all of the endless tasks we have to do each day.  Like that of everybody else I know, life is very full – and often wonderful – but this pace leaves me breathless.  If this were a B movie, we would now cut to a scene of calendar pages flying off the wall, one after another.  Christmas was yesterday.  Tomorrow we’ll be putting on swimsuits and heading to an outdoor pool.  Thinking like this gets me panicky.  And you know all of those people who see you with your young kids and tell you to, “Enjoy it!  It passes quickly!”  Those people aren’t helping and I’d like them to stop saying that.  I know that it will pass quickly because it’s all passing too quickly already and every time my stress level cranks up a notch – which always happens when people tell me it’s going to pass quickly – it passes just a bit faster and suddenly it’s Christmas again.

Perhaps this is why, when Geoff came to take Willan from my lap the other night to tuck him into his own bed, I shook my head and whispered, “Just five more minutes.”  I held onto him, my nose buried in his wispy hair, his fingers curled around one of my own.  Just five more minutes to listen to him breathe, to feel that warm weight – that stillness – of holding a sleeping child that is unlike any other sense of peace I have ever found.  When Geoff came back, I shook my head again.  “No, not yet.”  I didn’t want the stillness to end because Willan – this force of nature who redecorates my bathroom before bed most nights – never stops long enough for me to hold him like this.  And so I’ll admit that just the smallest piece of me was selfishly enjoying his brief and non-threatening illness because it allowed me to play the role a mother plays best.  I could give my boy all the comfort he needed in that moment and hold him while he slept.  I held him so long that evening that I slept too.

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It was lovely.  That is, until a few hours later when I got the stomach flu.