As I finished sweeping the floor, I felt a presence and looked up to see oldest son Ollie sitting on the stairs. I was surprised to see him. It was about an hour after my wife had to put him to bed, and usually, Ollie fell asleep without much aid or drama. Like most seven-year-olds, bedtime wasn't that dramatic. It was his three-year-old brother that demanded another story or for me to stay in his room with him, not Ollie. I looked up at his tired eyes, and he told me softly, "I'm having trouble going to sleep." I told him to go to his bed, and I'd be there in a minute to help him go to sleep.
I carefully got into bed with Ollie, and I felt him rest his head on my chest as my arm encircled his body. I lay there in the dark. I thought about asking Ollie if he felt okay or if he had a nightmare, but then I remembered how my mom taught me how to rock a baby to sleep. She told me when Ollie was a baby how to move the baby to calm them down and to feel that moment when the body relaxes into your arms, and that when the baby is older, to put the baby down right before this moment. This moment had passed, and Ollie's body felt warm and calm.
As his feet brushed up against my shins, I remembered how when I could cradle the entire length of his body with my forearm. When he was a toddler, and I would put him to bed, his feet would be at my waist with his arms would rest on my chest, too short to reach around my body. Now his arm reached all the around to the side of my torso.
There was a time when he told me that he was having trouble sleeping by crying. Sometimes he would be hungry or need a hug. It was a guessing game to figure out what he needed when he would wake up in the middle of the night. And as we got better at this game, he got better at telling us what he needed.
Ollie as a baby, sometimes needed to rock to sleep for a long time. After carefully swaddling him up, I would wedge a pacifier between his mouth and my chest as I walked around his room. Patting his butt to the rhythm of "Jingle Bells," I paced around the room. Sometimes he would calm enough for me to sit on the rocking chair to rock him to sleep. Other nights, he would cry as soon as I sat down, so I would have to get up and keep pacing.
Sometimes after a long time, Diana would come in and take a turn, helping put Ollie to sleep. Other times, he would calm, and as my mom described, his body would become heavy in my arms, and I would gently put him in his crib. Tired, but with a feeling of accomplishment, I left his room, which felt like a world in itself and entered back into a completely different world. When I was rocking Ollie to sleep, there was nothing else on my mind, and I had a single purpose. Upon leaving his room, I had to face the rest of my responsibilities, fears, and obligations.
Ollie didn't need me tonight to rock him or talk to him. He just wanted me there to cuddle with him to help him go to sleep. There was a time years ago when just holding him wasn't enough to help him go to sleep, and there will be times in the future when my embrace will not be enough to quiet the thoughts in his head so he can rest.
Ollie will have times in the future when he will be afraid and confused. He will feel fear as I did this past week and not know what to do. These thoughts will rob him of his peaceful rest, and he will find the darkness of night unnerving and cold, and the sleep will not come. However, tonight was not one of those nights.
Because tonight, I was enough.
"When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. "It's all right" we whisper, "I'm here, I love you." and we lie: "I'll never leave you." For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad."
- Neil Gaiman, Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days
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