THE WORLD SLEPT

Dear Spike:

You finally went down last night at about 11 p.m. It’s now nearly 7 a.m., and you’re still fast asleep in your cradle.

You are nearly two months old. And so it has been nearly two months since your mother and I have managed a regular night’s slumber. Lately, though, you have been sleeping for longer and longer stretches — five hours was your lengthiest rest, until now — and so I have been excitedly anticipating the moment when we could say you had slept through the night.
But the moments we most anticipate in life do not often play out in the way we expect. And this moment is no exception.

I was certain that I would meet this blessed, rested moment like a man who’d finally reached an oasis at the end of a long and thirty desert journey.

And yet at this hour, I feel a longing for the desert.

As exhausting as our all-night parties sometimes have been for me, I have really come to enjoy the hours we have shared as the rest of the world slept.

Oh, I’m certain there will be plenty of wide-eyed nights to come. I do not expect that you have suddenly grown disinterested in midnight meals and 2 a.m. tantrums.

But I also know the time is nearing when you will move out of our bedroom and into your own. And I know I will miss your presence here, so close by as I sleep and closer still when I feed you and rock with you and sing you songs and tell you stories, late into the night and early into the morning.

In the end — when the moments we anticipate have become the moments we remember — the best we can hope for are good memories.

These nights have been special times for me. I will remember them fondly. I will remember them forever.

Love,
dad