We NEVER Go Gentle Into That Good Night

instead, here in our house, we rage, rage against the dying of the light

I used to think nights were for sleeping. Those were some lovely days of uninterrupted, comfortable bliss. Then I had babies who don’t sleep. Eliot was up three times a night until six months, twice a night until ten months, and Lincoln was similar. Neither of them slept through the night until well after a year, and because they are so close together in age that was/is a long time without sleep.

Each family has its specific way in which they have to keep showing up; maybe one family has to change their diet because someone is diabetic, or maybe someone is handicapped and they have to change houses, or maybe someone in the family is terribly addicted to chocolate and resorts to strange hiding places and eating it whenever they can when they know no one is around to catch them. (Wow, that got weirdly specific.) And none of these things are easy. (Especially the chocolate one, since there are no uninhabited corners in our small house.)

When we became parents, I was prepared for some ways we might have to practice difficult love. I knew about the constant clothes washing and the small choking hazards on every single floor. But once Lincoln was born (and forever afterwards) we quickly discovered that for our family at this stage, choosing the hard way of love was waking up, again and again, so exhausted we want to cry (or kick the wall or scream) both then and the whole day afterwards. Instead of being restful, the nights became a moment and space to choose, over and over again, to love, at a time when it is the easiest to leave.

At night, the boys were and are always safe in beds and cribs, leaving them, and turning off the monitor, when I am so tired that I do not feel I can put one foot in front of the other, can be the easiest thing in the world. And at 3am when my brain doesn’t go straight to selflessness, straight to love (does it ever?) the urge to pick myself, to pick sleep and quiet and ignorance by choosing not to hear is sometimes so overwhelming that it has made me cry. (I don’t like to speak for Joe, no matter how true it is.)

And yes, I am always nudging my babies to better sleep, maybe leaving them for a bit longer each time, perfecting the patting their back but not picking up, singing while lying down beside the crib. Yes, we are always working at a solution for all of us, one where we respond and where we are not sacrificing our health. And we are wishing, always wishing that our boys were born with better adaptability, born with temperaments that were easier to calm. We have learned that 2am is an hour that never has enough room to hold all the anger and despair it induces. But through that, always, always, always showing up, because they are our people and we show up for our people.

Isn’t this where we make a difference after all? Isn’t this where we start to influence anyone, whether it be our babies or our siblings or our friends? Not in the rightness of our beliefs, not in the cleanliness of our houses, not in the importance of our jobs, but in our love, a love that shows up always, again and again when someone is upset, when what you would rather do is shut the door.

But slowly, and it’s really taken years, I’ve realized that family is also learning from each other, believing that everyone has worth and therefore something to teach. And I have been learning that my boys, these non-sleepers, have things to show me too. And what they have done well (besides show me how to become weirdly giddy after a 7 hour stretch where I am not awakened) is ensure that I am well-acquainted with these soft Hawaiian nights.

I know the nights, how they feel, from every room in my house. How from the living room the smell of the always blooming plumeria drifts in on the trade winds.  And sometimes, when we’ve had to move outside, the smell of the hibiscus because it’s easy to step on the fallen, wilted hibiscus on the sidewalks and slip a little in the dark and smell the gently crushed petals.

The darkness falls between the mountains and me, making them invisible, and it’s easy to imagine that we have the big sky here that I grew up with instead of the jagged volcanic sides. But just to remind me, from our front window I can see the thin, jeweled line of the lights on the Pali Highway curve around the mountain in the distance. It’s too far to see the occasional car, winding around to Honolulu, right on the edge of the mountain’s curve, but I can imagine it, carefully balanced on the narrow road, the sheer drop off beside them, and it’s driver, sleepy like I am, both hands on the wheel, also desperately wishing she could close her eyes.

This world, with its soft breezes and its darkness that falls softly down with the dropping hibiscus, is one that I would not have known without the boys I have. And the fallen avocado leaves rustle sharply in the corner where they have blown, and every once in a while the moon comes through our slatted windows and arranges itself in crisp rectangles on the wood floor.

You see, often our difficult love gives back.