We Exist Now

I am looking at instagram, lost in so many stories of loss, while my youngest is in the bath. He is soaking in bubbles, as is required by law, expounding on theory, all pertaining to Sesame Street.

I am here with him because I am still an integral player in his night time routine. He is not a kid we just send up to bed. Night night! Don’t forget to brush your teeth!

His bedtime is a collaboration. Or maybe it’s more like a guided meditation — one that involves water, soap and, on The Dreadful Nights, shampoo.

And I will be the first to say: I am a heavy-handed guide. I like things to get done, and I like them to get done fast.

I have always been this way — a parent of expedience, not a methodical one. I’ve alway struggled with plodding, step-by-step instruction. I am not a teach-a-man-to-fish person; I’m more of a give-a-kid-a-fish person — such that the kid eats the fish that one day and then needs another fish the next day.

I have given out so many fish.

And yet, this fish distribution system was a fine one for my three older kids who all reached a point where they wanted to fish. Like lady, give me the rod already. Show me how to bait, how to cast. To which I said, go ask your dad!

Now, with my youngest, the line of independence is fuzzier. That’s not to say he can’t do things for himself. He can — at 14, his health is stabilized by wondrous pharmaceuticals and he’s capable of more than we ever would’ve guessed when he was younger and seizing the better part of every day and night.

But he wants to do the fun things for himself — build a Lego set, make a trillion song jam on Spotify, use the remote to navigate to the depths of Apple TV — not the more annoying, perfunctory stuff. So could he brush his own teeth? Yes, of course. But he’d rather not. And I can do it faster and more thoroughly. So I do. Maybe I’m wrong to. But he’d need to be sedated to get a filling. And I don’t need to be right all the time.

Tonight, as we collab, my son is telling me one thing over and over again — that Grover on Sesame Street says that trees can dance. He wants me to agree that Grover is silly for saying this. And then he wants me to agree that Grover is silly for saying this again. “Grover! Do not be silly” he says, as if Grover is here with us to be admonished, and he says it like Grover, a serious enunciator, would: do noT be silly. He punches that t on the end of not.

Once I agree Grover is silly, we take the whole thing from the top. My son tells me that Grover says trees can dance followed by the discussion of silliness, the punched T.

This is what we do. We run conversational laps. I think of the intervals of high school track — run hard around the track for 90 seconds, recover for 60 and run the same length again. Oval upon oval.

Sometimes, at the end of a looping day, my effort wanes. I start running at 60%. I have always been this way too — I am listening on one mental channel, but I let it get staticky, like I’m not dialed to the exact frequency, a tick or two off because I’m also watching the world burn in every imaginable and unimaginable way on instagram; I’m also answering emails and texts; I’m also reading an article about — who knows what? Probably how to remain mindful in your daily life. I tend to my son’s station with an intermittent really? so he doesn’t sense my wandering tuner.

Really? A tree dancing? How funny!

Really Grover?! He is so silly!

Really — yes, yes, I know — cartoons are in the past.

Really — wait — what? The unexpected always gets my attention. Did you say that cartoons are in the past?

“Yes, Mommy, cartoons are in the past. They are dead.”

“Well, I’m not sure they’re dead? Since they weren’t alive to begin with? Maybe you mean pretend?”

“No, I mean dead. They are dead. But we exist now.”

Imagine walking around half asleep all the time, a borderline zombie, and someone beside you, at regular intervals, yelling “Wake up!”

I mean this metaphorically, and yet my son does also walk around yelling Boo! at regular intervals right in my face. Not exactly wake up!, but not exactly different.

And it doesn’t matter that my son might not always intend his depth. It’s there. Like on Thanksgiving when in one hour he dropped and shattered a glass cloche while getting a cookie, and then in the next hour I dropped and shattered a ceramic casserole dish while putting it down on the table. My son turned to me later at dinner and said, “You and I have both broken some fragile things today.” Which is a poem. Or a book title. Or a tattoo.

Same as this new offering: We exist now.

When he said it, I emailed it to myself because Yahoo! is my memory. But as it turned out, I didn’t need my inbox this time — I wouldn’t have forgotten it — I couldn’t stopped thinking about it.

I kept saying it in my head.

We exist now.

A reminder to keep tuned to your channels, to stay, to be here. Even in these Nows, and their tendencies towards worrisome, heartbreaking, barely bearable.

This life, right now, is the life, not the life of plans in texts or emails, not the life of four years from now, not the lives of others on instagram.

This one life. Wild and precious — of course I think of this. But my son doesn’t know this poem.

He just is a poet.

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In keeping with January’s assault on comfort and wellbeing, my son had a scheduled-six-months-ago sleep study last week.

These are medically not such a big deal and done widely. I do know this. But when your child’s medical history is a Big & Fat Deal, you lose your ability to assess the size of any deal at all. Your eyes get trauma-dilated. Shapes and reason blur.

On the night in question, my son and I drove into the city as it was getting dark. The hour, my companion, my night blindness — all of it made me uneasy, as if we’d been launched into space on a sudden shuttle mission. We were alone, suspended, untethered. It felt more vulnerable than it should have. I’d make a terrible astronaut.

We parked in a deserted garage a block from the hospital. Because it was just a quick overnight, I had packed in little bags, but an absurd number of them. They were hard to keep shouldered all at once.

Waiting at a crosswalk, my son looked up at the moon and told it good night, informed it that he was sleeping in the city tonight! With his Mommy! And to not worry — that the night might feel long, but the sun would be ready to take over in the morning.

“Say goodnight to the moon, Mommy,” as if he was worried the moon might find out I’m rude. I thought of the light and the red balloon and the bears and the chairs, but my son wasn’t meaning to make that reference. He wasn’t thinking of a bedtime story. He is a bedtime story.

My son scanned the black sky a bit more, saying he was looking for the space station. Maybe we can’t see it because we’re on it I thought but didn’t say. He asked me to help him search, just like his dad would, another man who regularly invites me to look up at the sky for one reason or another — a planet parade (last night!), a constellation, or, closer in, an owl. My son and husband are two people always interrogating what’s up there in the vast reaches, whereas I am confounded enough by things going on at ground level.

I rarely look up.

Someone needs to look sideways and down.

Half of the cars driving by us both ways on Divisadero were Waymos. I felt a kinship — I am just like a driverless car when I’m out with my son, eerie and careful, a spinning sensor on top of my head, assessing objects and risks all around us by the nanosecond. Making sure every move we make is safe, that we don’t have a run-in with a car or pedestrian or an elevator door.

We reached the sleep center and my hopes that it would be comfortable because it was a place built for sleep were dashed.

The tech led us to a door at the end of an ultra-wide hallway. We squeezed in and I imagined someone getting a design brief for this room — make it institutional, make it sad — and then following that directive faithfully. The lights were fluorescent. There were two framed prints of Something Cheery! hanging ill-located on the wall. There was one bed and one pull-out chair, the kind I’ve ridden through many nights in many rooms worse than this one.

I felt unsettled and unsafe and I was being a baby, and I knew it. Get a grip — there are people who’ve lost everything. This is just one night. Please! But that’s the thing about babies: they’re irrational! Immune to reason! And, based on the only kind I’ve ever birthed, terrible sleepers! And so it followed: I would not sleep.

Meanwhile, none of this bothered my son. He felt comfortable in the room right away. He isn’t an interrogator of spaces. He just walks in and makes wherever he is his place. Wherever you go, there you are. A mindfulness technique he lives by but has never heard of. Why is he here? Who knows! Something about sleep? Why are they painting him with paste? Why are they affixing wires all over him? Also hard to say, but likely related to the sleep thing?

The only important fact here is that he’s getting his iPad at bedtime! Whatta treat! The wires are barely strings attached in the face of such privilege.

Once the tech was done making him into a robot, I let him sit and watch for a while longer in the one chair in the room. Lights on the box to which he was now connected lit up and blinked. I greeted my PTSD at the door and told it to knock somewhere else. These signs weren’t vital. Things could beep and flash and no one would die if they did.

When I took the iPad away, my son was quite put out. He told me he had been watching that particular episode for the greater good — an explanation he has started to use any time he’s trying to get away with something. Here, as if there’s altruism to be found in media consumption. I asked him where he had learned about the greater good and he named a show. I realized he might be interpreting this saying as not a good for more people, but an improved and better version of good itself. Ergo: some iPad is good; more iPad is greater good.

He got on the bed and under the covers which seemed a lot like a big towel and I figured he would not sleep at all attached to all these wires, with gauze wrapped under his chin and around his face, distorting him, making his profile not his own. I assumed the nasal cannula would be something he would rip out. I was certain the cementy bed would make him toss and turn

But, as I have been about him in big and small ways for 14 years now, I was wrong. He fell asleep quickly, faster than the unwired child of his own comfy bed at home. He started snoring in a way that made the sleep apnea we were here to find out about seem a foregone conclusion, like the tech might walk back in to the room, disconnect him and send us home. We’ve heard all we need to hear.

I worried what this diagnosis might mean — would he need surgery? Or a cpap machine? — but then I dismissed these thoughts like they were students sitting in the wrong classroom. Because while my Big Deal scale is out of whack, I’ve grown better at managing unknowables. Or at least very worn down by them. I remind myself: there’s no point in trying to game Concern. Outcomes always surprise — for the better, for the worse, for the neutral. So why play yourself?

The night was uneventful. No one ran down the hall to our room in the deadest of night, no machines screamed that the human embedded within needed help.

The only unusual thing that happened was the TV audio popped on at 5am in every room in the center. The techs didn’t know why and couldn’t immediately fix it. My son slept right on through, and since I wasn’t asleep anyway, I just listened to these sounds detached from their visuals. All over this city, people were waking up and some were even out there choosing this program. A droning dispatch from another planet.

When my son woke up, the tech came into the room and turned him back into a human boy. His hair was shiny and crunchy, and while a lot of teens might’ve not wanted to go straight to school with a head that had spent the night in drywall, he did. Because he had a field trip! And that means fun stuff! Plus the rarest of birds for a California kid: a bus ride!

Hours later, we are back at a different branch of the hospital in the city. Why? Because I told him that’s what we had to do today. Something to do with his heart? Who knows! What’s important is he gets to watch a movie of his choosing while a different tech plops more guck on his chest and probes around for the secrets inside him.

I sit in the dark exam room and watch him watch the screen. I can’t wait to leave this room, ride the elevator down to the lobby, get the car from the valet, drive home to Sesame Street songs, walk into our house, beeline for the bath and get him into bubbles — to scrape the bonding material off his scalp, to scrub the last 24 hours off of him. And me.

But that’s not what he’s thinking. He’s not cycling through what will come next. Or the thing after that.

He’s watching dead cartoon characters.

And existing now.

Jen.

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