As far as Saturdays go, it was lacking in entertainment. I slept sporadically the night before, and felt the tinge of some sort of bug invading my sinuses and lungs, prepared to engage in warfare against whatever T cells are standing guard on the night shift. Sluggish. Stagnant.
This did not bode well for the general weekend task of keeping my daughter's mind occupied. She jumped on my gut around 8:15 asking for a Muscle Milk. This is a demographic the protein shake community may have forgotten: adolescent girls with an affinity for vanilla-flavored pseudo-dairy products. After double-fisting caffeine into my system and waiting for my eyes to stay open and focus simultaneously, I did what I tend to do when I am not quite ready for life to happen: I flipped on Nickelodeon.
I know that today will be unremarkable among the annals of my daughter's life. I may beat myself up over that certainty now, but I'm also aware that days like today make trips to farm festivals or ice skating or driving to the beach have more of an impact. If every day is an A+ then that dilutes the grading system. It's the first thought, the "well, I sure gave her a day to forget", that led me to offer her an invitation to a low-key slumber party in my room tonight.
We ate homemade buns leftover from dinner. We watched an anthropomorphic snail race around a track on the television. We drew silly animals on the whiteboard. We took goofy pictures of our goofy faces, and then after a chapter of Judy Blume ("The Pain and the Great One"), I set up the space heater by the futon and gave her my thickest blanket and she fell asleep mid-sentence. "I'm thirsty...can I...grab...a..."
She still coos in her sleep, and it somehow sounds exactly the same as it did 7 years ago. Being brand new to fatherhood (back then, that is) I was not aware that I would spend most of my waking moments concerned that my daughter was constantly in some sort of impending danger. Her crib might collapse. A tidal wave might transpire and flood her bedroom. If the apartment was silent, then trouble was brewing. Bedtime was the most frustrating, because you read one goddamn article on SIDS and you feel like you need to stay up all goddamn night and hold a mirror to her nostrils to make sure she's breathing. But her little slumbering murmurs were tiny beacons, like an everything's-okay-alarm. I'm unscathed and I'm content and I'm fine, and your job is safe, for now.
My daughter is half of a symbiotic relationship, and she doesn't even know it. That's a lie. She does. She is one of the few people on this earth that has the uncanny ability to interpret my distress signals and try to do something about it, although she does not have a large arsenal of solutions. Usually it's "come here and cuddle me" (the "dammit" at the end of that command is implied) or "let me draw you a picture." Pictures make everything better.
I have a friend that does the same (although her methods are different than demanding cuddles or offering up crude drawings). "Friend" is too fucking catch-all of a word. Collaborator...compatriot...supporter. If we were jumping through time, a la Lost, she would be my constant. I'm probably much less subtle with her in my everything-is-dissolving moments than I am with my daughter, but being naturally reticent still leaves everyone with a lot of interpretation, and she excels at cutting through the bullshit.
Today required a bullshit knife, for sure. I've spent the past two weeks slowly blurring the line between introspection and chaos...or maybe I just wasn't aware that there was such a line. In the rare moments where I would assess the situation I've cultivated, I'd have to ask myself are you being unpredictable just for the sake of unpredictability? And my only answer was a shrug of the shoulders. But these people heeded the call...the low, nearly hidden beneath the noise and bright lights call. And, because of them, I can go to sleep...maybe not smiling, but certainly not frowning.
I am grateful to have these people in my life. My lighthouses. My blinking lights. My black boxes. My mirrors. My comforting pats on the shoulder. My humans.
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