There are no Acts of Love, only Selves of Love

Her crying is wet, hiccuping; she stands at the bars of her crib and coughs out these glottal stops. Each one, another bubble of sadness floating out into the darkness. After a few minutes, the cries become more urgent, the sorrow more keen as if she is asking the dark ‘will no one come?’Her faith in us—the good forces in the world—rapidly ebbing. The screen on the baby monitor flickers on and subsides, flickers on again and, as the cries become a wail, stays on, filling the room with the garish color of periwinkles.

I roll over noisily to wake Gina. I tell myself I’d go in, but naturally moms are better at this sort of thing. She’s nurturing and calm. When I go in there, I only exacerbate the situation and then no one gets any sleep. This is what I tell myself anyway and I roll back over, sighing loudly and stretching. Gina wakes up all at once. She’s already been up twice and has just fallen asleep. It takes no more than a second for her to comprehend the scenario. The myrtle flower light of the monitor, the hiccuping wail, tinny through the monitor speaker, urgent through the walls and tremolo in the kitchen. She tosses back the blanket.

“Do you want me to go?” I ask in a bullshit way.

“No,” She responds, unmasking my bullshit by leaving the room before I have time to say anything else.

Her feet fall heavily across the small house. On the stove, the finger bowls of salt and pepper rattle a little. The candles and picture frames on the bookshelf knock together with a castanet clicking. I wonder if this is her way of letting our daughter know she’s coming. The wail does not diminish. If anything, it becomes even more urgent and then, after the door to the small bedroom with leopard removable wallpaper and a bookshelf full of board books about going to sleep opens, the wail goes back to a hiccuping cry and even from across the house, I can hear how she’s raised her little arms up in her crib to be lifted away from the dark sadness. And once she is lifted, her crying quiets and stops. She wants such a simple thing: to not be left alone because she is very small and unfamiliar with the learned response to solitude and quiet and darkness. For her I know each moment passing in the dark alone must feel impregnated with all of time itself. I remember, even at six or seven lying in my bed and thinking through the dark and quiet until it began to feel like everyone I loved was gone, that the dark had swallowed them and it felt so terrible tears would roll down my checks and I would think ‘my poor mom’ over and over, seeing her gone and then it would occur to me that if I went to her room and just saw she was still there, I wouldn’t have to worry and when I crossed the hall and saw her sleeping, I knew everything was fine, that tomorrow would come as sure as the previous day had. But what did I do before I could get up? Before I could move across the house and make sure my mom was still there? Did I lie there and cry and wail, bouncing up and down in my crib, waiting through dark hours for someone to come and prove the world was still there? What agony to be so long in suspense and then what torture to be so long certain.

The house has gone quiet and I roll back over and sleep. When Gina gets back into bed 10 minutes later, I don’t wake up. But when the cries start hiccuping again and the light of the monitor flares up, I wake up and become restless. I lie there listening, seeing my daughter’s tear-streaked face and her little hands clenching the top railing of the crib. I’m feeling more awake, even to be woken up three times and go back to sleep starts to compromise the quality of my rest, though I’m the lazy one. I pull my courage together and swing my legs over the side of the bed.

“I’ll go,” Gina says, coming up from the bed by straightening her arms, pushing down on the mattress.

“Are you sure?” I ask, already starting to swing my legs back into bed. And she goes, but this time I don’t fall asleep again. I lie there, listening to the cries mellow into quiet thinking about these two people I love, how they’re suffering for each other and how I don’t figure into the situation. How this is the role of dads everywhere, to go back to bed, to only emerge when the situation is resolved or has become completely untenable and no one can sleep. My family needs me and I’m just lying here, preserving myself for work, following the American mantra that doing is all that matters and my ‘doing’, as the man, is not here but at work.

I’m groggy, but no longer tired. It’s almost six. I get out of bed, go out to the kitchen and put the kettle on. In the living room, Gina is lying on the floor, half asleep and my daughter is in her room happily pulling all her books off the bookshelf, one at a time, throwing them behind her with no concern for where they land. I tell Gina to go to bed, to try to get a little sleep before the morning, although I know she won’t. It’s too late for that, but maybe next time I’ll get it together a little earlier.

My daughter hears me and drops her last book before crawling over in her quick and somewhat floppy way. I reach down and pick her up. The tears on her face have dried, but her eyes are still a little glassy and her palms are wet, though it’s difficult to tell if it’s tears or sweat that’s moistened them. Almost as soon as I pick her up, she starts wriggling to be put down and I follow her over to another pile of books she starts to go through. She throws them and laughs now that I’m watching.

Gina goes to bed and I pick my daughter up from her books and show her how to grind coffee and pour the hot water into the press. She watches with sleepy attention. Then we go back to the living room to read and watch the sun come up through the windows and as she turns the pages of the book we’re reading, I’m glad to have woken up, to be here for this moment of being, as spending time with my daughter, no matter how early in the morning, is the only part of my day this isn’t ‘doing’. It’s the only thing I’ve ever known that is fulfilling without an associated sense of accomplishment. There’s nothing to be ‘done’ we just ‘are’ together.

Maybe Gina and I are spoiling our daughter by getting up with her in the night and not letting her cry by herself in the dark hours that are so much darker and longer for her. Maybe we’re not properly preparing her for the rigors of life. For now, I am happy to make the sacrifice to spare her the discomfort of the sadness of being apart from the ones you love. It seems like too grievous a thing to be insisting a baby learn so young and she’s so happy now, playing with these books. How can I deny her when all she wants is to not be alone? Why does she need to learn this terribly American skill at all? Why do we place so much value on the individual? Because their support will one day fade away? Should we not love our daughter to the full extent of our ability because one day we will die and no longer be able to actively supply her with this love? No. Even if I can’t always get myself out of bed, I will always want to go to her, to alleviate her suffering. Nothing could change that. Nothing could undo it.

After an hour, Gina wakes up and in the roseate light of the early morning, the three of us ‘are’ together. We sit there, together, not entirely awake, and relish the opportunity to be without doing. Later the light will spread across the fields and make its customary demands for the day, but for now there’s nothing to accomplish, but so much to be.