Dear's First Blog!

Generally, it’s my job to put Lala and Baby to bed at night. When the darkness falls and the girls start to rub their eyes and get clingy, the phrase “bedtime” is uttered and I go to scoop up Baby in my arms to take her to her crib. She knows what this means and immediately starts to let loose with her desperate cries at the dreadful prospect of letting go of consciousness and slipping off to sleep. At almost three, Lala is more understanding, but she still has nights where she wails in protest at being confined to her bed.

Before bed tonight, Lala and I were playing keep-away with a spool of ribbon that she wanted to unwind all over the place. When she made a play for the spool, I shifted it to my other hand and tickled her ribs until she squealed with laughter. We then progressed to a game of “You can’t catch me” in which Lala taunted in a sing-song voice that I could not catch her. She would pretend to run away until I pursued her, at which point she would double back and try to run past me, but barely within my reach. I’d scoop her up as she passed by and tickle her until she shrieked with glee at the game. I could tell Baby wanted in on the action. She was sitting in her mother’s lap and watching with bright attentive eyes and a six-tooth smile on her face. The problem is that Baby just did not understand how this fun game worked. So she just watched and smiled.

In the mayhem and laughter, Baby started to rub her eyes in the telltale sign that it was bedtime. I uttered the dreaded phrase and approached to scoop her into my arms and whisk her off to the slatted prison of her crib. Instantly, she burst into her tearful crying that made me feel like the ultimate bad guy. But I did not lose courage or resolve. We ambled down the hallway and I narrated every step of the way. I explained that we were walking down the hall . . .that we were going into her room . . .that we were turning on her closet light . . .that we were clearing a path through the toys on the floor to her crib. However, I paused to sit on Lala’s bed and read a book to Lala and Baby. During the story, Baby points at the images on the page and looks up expectantly for me to attach words to the images at which she is pointing.

After the story is over, I place Baby in her crib and she starts to cry as she usually does. Tonight, I decided music might help the girls sleep, so I went to the computer to burn a CD of some soothing songs to help the girls drift off to sleep. The evening’s selection was Lullaby and The Luckiest by Ben Folds Five, Only Time and Storms in Africa by Enya, and When the Love Breaks Down and Life is Beautiful by Vega 4. While I was burning the CD, Lala dumped her Dora dolls into the crib along with a book to entertain Baby and distract her from her bedtime grief. When I came in, Lala asked to go into the crib with her blanket and pillow. I obliged and the girls laid their heads together on the Dora pillow while Ben Folds sang Lullabye and the Luckiest on the karaoke machine next to the crib. While she grasped the slats of her crib, Baby fell asleep as I stroked her hair and softly sang along with Ben Folds, “I am the luckiest.”

Lala would not go down so easily. She wanted to play and there just was not room in the crib. I took Lala and her contraband out of the crib and transferred her across the room to her bed. She took great offense and ordered me off her bed when I sat down to kiss her good night. Enya eventually softened her heart to the point that Lala puckered up her little lips to give me a kiss. I went to kiss her goodnight and she turned away at the last moment like Lucy pulling the football away as Charlie Brown approached for his kick. She did this three times before I gave up and kissed her on the cheek at which she exclaimed indignantly, “You kissed me!” Then she turned her cheek to solicit another kiss. I told her it was time for her to go to sleep and for me to go watch a movie with Mommy. She grabbed me and told me to lay down because of the monsters. Again, I obliged. While I laid down on the little twin bed, she flopped from the head of the bed to the foot of the bed and back again and told me all she knows about polar bears.

At one point in her monologue, she placed her head on the opposite side of the pillow from me and in the soft blue glow of the karaoke machine screen, she smiled and said, “I love YOU, Daddy.” At that moment, she was backed up by Vega 4 singing:

Life is beautiful

We live until we die

When you run into my arms,

We steal a perfect moment.

Let the monsters see you smile,

Let them see you smiling.

Do I hold you too tightly?

When will the hurt kick in?

Life is beautiful, but it's complicated.

We barely make it.

We don't need to understand,

There are miracles, miracles.

Yeah, life is beautiful.

Our hearts, they beat and break.

When you run away from harm,

Will you run back into my arms,

Like you did when you were young?

Will you come back to me?

I will hold you tightly

When the hurting kicks in.

Life is beautiful, but it's complicated,

We barely make it.

We don't need to understand,

There are miracles, miracles.

Stand where you are.

We let all these moments pass us by.

In the beauty of that moment, the hurting kicked in. The hurting came from the knowledge that as hard as I try to stand where I am and hold onto such moments, they inevitably pass us by. I thought of the saying that God gives us memories so we can have June roses in the December of our lives. I also thought of how fragile, fleeting and undependable my brain is when it comes to storing memories. I read once that the brain is an instrument of forgetting, but it is the soul that is the instrument of remembering. Perhaps that is why we see the panorama of our lives when the spirit is liberated from the instrument of forgetting. So I laid there and listened to her chatter about polar bears, Dora the Explorer, Swiper the Fox and desperately tried - as the hurting kicked in - to indelibly store that June rose in a place within my soul from which I can retrieve it in the December of my life.