Night Moves

Cai never slept in his crib. He preferred our bed, and later a playpen. After sleeping in the portable bed for months and months, one day at the cabin – I guess he was barely two years old, he told me he wanted to sleep in the ‘big bed’, a twin in his villa room. So that was it, he had graduated to the big boy bed. When we got home I converted the useless crib into a toddler bed, luckily we bought the convertible model. It’s basically a crib with three sides and the mattress lowered. He is quickly elongating – I’ve thought more than once about graduating him to a regular twin, but it works for now.

Nearly every night he asks me to lay down with him, we talk for a couple of minutes, mostly about what we will do tomorrow, and then I am allowed to get up and wish him sweet dreams. Lately he has been interested in birth stories. He has asked me to tell him about his birth and Choco’s birth more times than I can count. On the way to the grocery store I tell him how my belly ached all day, how the doctor’s gave me medicine that makes babies come out when he was born, how his Papa and I were so happy – ‘And you cwied’ he will cut in, ‘Cause you was SO happy’.

So he has asked me to tell him his Papa’s birth story and my own, to which I claim no knowledge and tell him he will have to ask his grandparents. So last night we are laying in bed and I am recounting his story and then Choco’s. I tell him how I watched a movie on the couch while he napped. How I called his Papa, then his Auntie. How his Papa took me to the store on the way to the doctor and I ate ice cream. And after these two stories he asks to know the story of when I was born and as I start to tell him again that I don’t know, he cuts me off screaming, he has remembered that my dad is visiting, ‘Pop-pop!’ he squeals, because my dad knows the story.

So my dad comes in, in the dark of my little boys room, I'm cradled around his tiny figure in a too-small bed I’m hanging on to. He puts his hand on my child’s head and asks him what’s up. “Will you tell me when my Mama born?” And I explain to my father what he wants. And he does. He tells him it had just been Christmas and the next day he took Grandma Juey to the hospital, and how they waited all night, and how the next morning his Mama was born. My dad does not add the details, he is not a storyteller. But Cai is satisfied and I am so grateful for the dark, so grateful he cannot see the tears running into my boy’s soft hair.

I am feeling quick and light and full of mercy these days. I am feeling like I’m on tip-toes, sometimes with weights on my shoulders, sometimes with angels.