Lullaby

When you were an infant, I used to sing you a pop song with the line in it, “I never thought about love when I thought about home.” I sang the song because another one of its lyrics expressed my, then otherwise secret, financial worries (“I still owe money to the money, to the money I owe”) but mainly because it was a slow song in a deep register that made my chest rumble when I sang, which helped you fall asleep as I held you. A strange lullaby, but effective.

I don’t believe I’ve thought as much as most folks have about either love or home. Wallace Stevens once mused that, “Life is an affair of people, not of things, and yet for me for me life has been an affair of things, and that is the problem.” Something like that has held for me as well, although perhaps neither people nor things have counted as much for me as they ought. Life for me has been an affair of changes. But then you were born, and the changes I attended to increasingly involved you. I thought about love more. I even thought a little about home.

I loved you on arrival, and we bonded in those early days more than a typical father and infant might have otherwise because you struggled with latching on to your mother’s breast your first week and then, once you did get the hang of it, you wore her out with multiple night feedings that always woke her up. When you were three months old, she developed full-blown, persistent insomnia that afflicted her, on and off, for years. She needed extra help from me.

As a consequence, you slept on my chest your first couple of weeks, and I often spent the small hours cradling you in a rocking chair in the moonlit cabin so that your mother could sleep, sometimes feeding you sugar water from my pinky fingertip. When you finally fed better, it became my task to rise with you just before dawn, after your last nursing, and take you out to the front room with me to change you and keep you company while your mother slept in for a while. When her insomnia became really bad, we tried treating it by having you sleep with me in another room occasionally. I bottle-fed you her expressed breast milk or a half-and-half mixture of breast milk plus formula whenever you woke hungry in the night.

I confess, I liked those nights. I didn’t sleep great, but I loved having your little bundle snoring softly beside me. From the time I first held you right after you were born, I have always found your mere presence comforting. Even now, when you sometimes clamber into my bed at four or five in the morning, thrashing and whispering, poking resentful me awake, I can’t bring myself to kick you out of the room completely. I like having you around, whether as companion or nuisance.

I think that’s how you became both love and home for me, even when you were being exhausting. It was also usually my task, the years when your mother and I still lived together, to be the first responder to any nightmares or cries in the night, in hopes of preserving her all-too-fragile sleep. I spent hours and hours in the dark beside your crib and, later, in a chair next to your bed, either soothing or crooning you back to sleep—or just waiting silently to be sure you really were truly back asleep. And, the majority of mornings, I got up with you or you woke to get up with me. Our lives rotated around each other and you were a steadily growing center of gravity for me.

But life is an affair of changes. There are the subtle, happy changes of growth that I took care to note—now you’re older, for instance, you sleep through the night almost all nights, mercifully, and you’re a more and more interesting person, conversationally. But there are also the unhappy changes of personal failures and a marriage disintegrating. Nowadays, I don’t get to spend as much time with you, and I don’t have a partner anymore to help me make a home for you when I’m with you. I worry that home and love may come apart for you.

I’m an old father who spent nearly half a century being someone who lived mostly alone and always without children. Busy watching the curious ways the world would alter itself around and within in me, I rarely meditated on home and future family. Once in a while, yes. From time to time, I hoped. I married. I tried. I went back to living alone. So it goes.

Now, thanks to more than seven years of being a father, thanks to you, I do often think about love when I think about home, and vice versa. And if I cannot always be there for you, I hope that you remember all of it wrapped together whenever you think about father and family, love and home.