Patience

I am not patient. I am, in fact, the opposite of patient.

It is more difficult, of course, to be patient on the road. The Babyman is cutting his molars, and his generally jolly disposition is clouded with pain. He grimaces, he whines, he refuses to sleep. I am sitting, right now, in a room with a piano, an organ, a desk and a crib.

The Babyman watches me, eyes round and glittery, from behind the bars. He rubs his face with his wee hands, wiping away the stray tear that rolls down his perfect peach of a cheek.

The crib has no bumpers; purchased years ago for The Poo, they never fit. The Poo was a sound sleeper then. Once she was out, nothing short of a nuclear explosion would rouse her.

The Babyman is her opposite in so many ways: The bumpers are not tied to the rails, because his nocturnal acrobatics render them lethal.

He sticks his ankle through the bars, moaning at me from behind them. I know this is a mistake, this vigil. I know he will come to expect it, and that I will have to disabuse him of the habit. I know he will weep, and that my stone face will not betray the pain in my heart when his wild cries filter through the door of the nursery at my mother’s house.

I can’t break him here. Too many people coming and going, too much chaos. Tomorrow, a family party that begins just as he should be taking his afternoon nap. What should I do? Shut us all up here in the house, because of nap time?

I can’t do that, as much as I would like to. There are some times when you have to bend the rules. This leg of the trip is the most difficult, but I knew it would be.

He’s laughing at me now, the whisper of a cry in his smile. He wears pajamas with monkeys on them. His bottle of water sloshes as he jumps around on the mattress.We play peek-a-boo, I laugh in spite of myself.

***

It took him two hours to go down, why I can’t guess. Teeth? The confusion of a new place? Rage at being confined when his sister was out for ice cream with daddy, her grandfather and his wife?

Perhaps it was all of it, everything. With his limited repertoire of words–night-night, mama, dank oo, mmm-good!–he is unable to tell me why he cries so raggedly.

My vocabulary is significantly larger, and yet, I, too am unable to communicate why it is that his small face over the bars, twisted with the kind of misery every child should be so lucky to experience, makes me feel so unbearably tender.

And patient.