I think the measure of a person can most clearly be taken when they are woken up in the middle of the night by a screaming child.
Me for instance: I transform into a flashing-eyed, gravelly-voiced, snarling beast who growls rambling invectives that have "go back to sleep!" somewhere in them.
Nate actually doesn't get woken up in the middle of the night by screaming children. Sometimes he does get woken up by the Beast who demands to know how in the name of all that's holy he can sleep through all that howling. At least he has an excuse since he has to get up far earlier in the morning than the Beast does, but at 2 am, the Beast is not usually cognizant of or sympathetic to a reality that is still several hours away.
But on with the story: Sethie is claiming his two-year-old territory quite aggressively these days. Nursery at church has suddenly become a POW camp. Grocery shopping is a hostage situation. Maybe I'm just not used to it because Thomas spent most of his two's like Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky: recklessly blithe. He may have gotten hurt a lot, but you'd never catch him unhappy. For the most part, Sethie is happy, too, and everywhere we go, he charms the pants off everyone (which is a little awkward...). But that's if we going somewhere he actually wants to be. If not, Enter the Dragon.
We call this face "evil baby", which Sethie thinks is hilarious and will perform on demand:
"Do 'evil baby', Sethie!" He bunches up his fists and tightens up the muscles in his face and he looks like he's about to go all Chucky on you. It's funny, but sometimes we worry because, well, is Evil Baby really in there? I jokingly call the kids "Children of the Corn" sometimes if they're really driving me nuts, but maybe I'm just encouraging it...
So driving back from tangentville to Main Story Street, Nate and I made a series of mistakes last night that drove our otherwise sweet Sethie to don the Evil Baby mask, sort of like when Bruce Banner warns a group of thugs "Don't make me angry...!", but the thugs just laugh and keep harassing him anyway. Surprisingly, Sethie has no trouble going to sleep, as long as Thomas is with him. They have their bedtime routine with baths and teeth-brushing and a getting-dressed contest that culminates in the winner getting his bedtime story first. And then we have prayers, everybody gets tucked in, and--usually--silence ensues.
Last night, before Nate and I went to bed, we decided to peak in on our boys (Mistake #1), just to make sure....I don't know, they were still in there? Well, Sethie was in there, eyes open. I imagine he's like any of us who occasionally wake up in the night, but if you feel safe and you don't think there are other options than just lying quietly in bed, you'll lie quietly in bed. Obviously the magical appearance of Mommy and Daddy must have seemed like another option to Sethie. When we tried to leave, he started to cry. This was around midnight and our brains were tiredness-addled, so we concluded (Mistake #2) that the best option to get him to go back to sleep was to bring him into our own bed.
There's a reason why tiredness causes more car accidents than alcohol consumption. It makes you stupid. You forget that you have never had a child in your bed who didn't think it was 1) entertaining and 2) not a place to actually sleep. You also forget that you have never gotten a good night's sleep either with any child next to you. Sethie's new thing is asking what everything is/has/does and will repeat the question incessantly until you give him an answer that satisfies him. The heater came on: "What's that, Mommy? What's that, Mommy? What's that, Mommy?" The light on Nate's Blackberry blinked: "What's that, Mommy? What's that, Mommy? What's that, Mommy?" One of us actually had the gall to fall asleep and snore a little: "What's that, Mommy? What's that, Mommy? What's that, Mommy?" I adjusted one-tenth of an inch in bed: "What you doing, Mommy? What you doing, Mommy? What you doing, Mommy?"
Finally, around 2 am, I started to remember all the other times in which bringing this child into bed with us has worked (0). So I gently told him it was time to go back to "Sethie's bed", scooped him up, and carried him back into his own room (Mistake #3).
Had this been a movie, ominous music would have begun to play to a close-up of his otherwise adorable face contorting, malforming into....Evil Baby!
Sethie started crying. Actually, crying is not the word for it. Crying sounds almost cute. This was Unholy Misery unleashed. I looked around to see if angry villagers with pitchforks were going to start storming our castle. I put him in his crib, zipped up his crib tent, gritted my teeth, and decided to leave him there, hoping that he was just tired and the sounds of damned souls emanating from his room would eventually cease. But as I was leaving, I heard a different sound: a tired, confused, and plaintive "Mommy?"
Thomas. Normally he can sleep through anything (my favorite story is of the time we were moving out of NYC to our current place and we had stacked all our boxes in Thomas's room, so he was sleeping on the floor of our room. I got up in the middle of the night, forgetting he was there, and stepped on him. I mean, full on him, with all my weight. He didn't wake up. He said, "Oof." That was it), but I had let loose the Furies into his room, and who could blame him for not snoring through that? So I couldn't just leave him in there with the howling sirens of Doom. I went back in.
Here, though, is the measure of us. My goal was just to get Sethie to a point where I could go back to bed. I admit, I had no sympathy for him, even though he was clearly in crisis, but it was a two-year-old crisis. Not important! Even though it was my fault he had woken up in the first place! But Thomas did. He had been jarred awake in the middle of the night by air raid sirens issuing out the lungs of his little brother and what does he start saying but, "Sethie, Tommy's here. Tommy's here" in a kind and soothing voice.
"I want to see Tommy," Sethie hiccupped. I showed him that his brother was still in the other bed. That at least made the crying stop, but I still couldn't leave or it would start all over again. So I sat on the floor in my skivvies and sang a lullaby that I learned from Nate which is repetitive and sleep-inducing and found myself both shivering and nodding off. But every time I tried to inch out back out the door, Sethie would start to cry again. Thomas seemed to sense my rope was ending (kids always know when you're about to lose it before you do). He said, "Sethie, do you want Tommy to sing to you?" Sethie said yes.
Thomas didn't know the song I was singing, but he gamely joined it, happily bumbling through the words alongside me. When I stopped singing, he kept going. I backed out of the room. I heard him say, "Sethie, do want Tommy to sing you a new song?" Sethie said yes. Thomas started to sing a song he had made up, one about Keyboy, his invented superhero, and bad guys, and saving the day. Sethie stayed quiet. I went back to my own room. I lay in bed for a little while afterwards, listening to Thomas take care of his little brother and thought what broad shoulders he had, on top of which to lay the solace of a little, sad soul.
I never heard another word the rest of the night. Thank you, my brave Keyboy. And I'm sorry, my sweet Evil Baby. You both deserve great things. I'm so grateful that you have each other.
