The Monster in the Room

Monologue from 2010

A few months ago my wife and I worked through one of those incomprehensible and difficult parent nights. Our eleven-month-old son, who normally sleeps through the night, was up—at first—until 3:27. When you’re a new parent, you notice these temporal specifics.

And by “up,” I mean Linda Blair up. Up like a 1980s fund manager on a three-day coke bender.

He had gone down at about 9:30 or so but had bolted upright into a scream at 11:47. It was my turn to take him. We had a lovely diaper change and a bottle, and he had seduced me into imagining that he was sleeping—limp-arm sleeping, as my wife calls it.

I sat him back into the crib and began to creep out of his room, and it was as if I had poked him with a cattle prod. He sometimes has this WWII hand crank air raid-siren thing that he produces. That’s what he started producing.

I picked him up and we cuddled again until he was sleeping. Again, I laid him down, and the same thing. I spent most of my paltry sleep magic on him, but anytime there was the possibility of my leaving the room he was up and screaming.

My wife relived me at 12:42. She said, “Can you sleep if I take him?” She always asks that because I am a notoriously light sleeper. She can sleep through the sound of bog banshee wailing it’s high pitched, curdling squeal through our back yard, which is oddly enough the same sound that our neighbor’s car makes every morning. (Come on, Mike, could you seriously get that serpentine belt replaced? For the love of God.)

I, naturally, told her that I could sleep. And I believed it. You see, she has some sort of baby magic that I don’t fully understand, and it nearly always works. But I became a silent witness to her first impossible struggle.

Lost, after a time, in that gray sleepy twilight, I would shiver into consciousness, shaken by a wail from the next room. My wife would begin shushing and humming. Then my son would break into a low keening, a stuttering breathy guttural thing that made me feel like I was living in a Poe story.

It was interminable. But like during the birth of my son, my wife was nearly superhuman. She pressed on like some British captain facing the Zulu hoard. He wailed, she hummed, he keened. Humming and keening. Humming and keening. Then quiet.

Then wailing. Humming and keening. Humming and keening. Then quiet.

Finally, at 3:27 she slipped beside me into bed, the house finally blanketed in silence. I took her hand and said gently, “You are amazing. Tonight you truly became a mom. I don’t know how you do it. I certainly couldn’t.” At least that’s what my brain was trying to say. It actually came out as, “Yuuuur tune moooooork. Mmmmm.”

But for a quiet moment: bliss.

At 3:43 my eyes flipped open to another scream. It was my turn. As I wheeled my legs out of bed and sat up, my wife said sleepily, “Seriously?”

“I’m just gonna do the thing,” I replied.

“The thing” worked every time. It was cheap, it was easy, it was a ridiculous waste of resources. It was the type of thing that dads do. I packed him up and we went for a drive.

It’s not the smartest thing to do: packing your kid into your car and driving, sleep-deprived, through the city at 4:00 in the morning. But I did it. It was magic. And in the passing glow of each streetlight, I could see him falling away to that place we liked him to be. And within ten or fifteen minutes he was a rag doll.

I pulled back into the driveway, carefully removed him from the car seat, and tenderly crept his soundly sleeping self back to his crib. I was nearly limp with relief. And when I set him gently onto his mattress, he was suddenly awake and keening. And for a moment I had one of those images of padded Victorian rooms and tormenting jailers flash through my addled brain.

Now here is where I made the mistake. You see, my wife and I had been talking about some of our friends who had had to do the difficult task of breaking the kid into self-soothed sleep. This is where you let your kid know you’re there for them, but you leave the room for longer and longer periods to let them know that they are safe even when they are alone.

Yup, I decided. Tonight must be the night. I was able to handle about an hour of that. Each time I moved from the crib, my heart would break a little. And he was not at all interested in this plan of mine.

Finally, he had been at it long enough that I felt he was probably hungry. I pulled him out and he was instantly calm, though not really interested in eating. He just wanted to hang out in my arms.

As we rocked, I noticed the new fan we had brought into his room to help out with the air circulation.

It was a tower fan. A Hawaiian Breeze brand tower fan. And he began to doze, nestled in my arms. I realized that the fan, in the dark, did not look like a fan.

Now at the time I thought it might be because I was bleary-eyed tired. But the thing looked like a monster. It had two red lights at the top, to tell us, first of all, that it was on. It had another light to tell us that it was on “Lo” (which is another thing all together).

The wind grill, underneath the lights, was a long, dark, cavernous mouth, with strange and unnatural teeth. It was, even for me, a little disconcerting.

And the best part. It was pointed at my son’s crib. It was also between his crib and the door.

So any time I left the room there this thing was…between us.

It took me a while to convince myself that this could be the issue. Once I did, though, at 5:23 am, I got up and quietly—with one hand, mind you— got a strip of duct tape, taped it over the beady red eyes of the fan, then turned it away from his crib.

I set my sleeping child down in his crib. He popped up fully awake to standing and watched me as I went to the door. I stood in the door for a moment. He plopped down and finally went to sleep.

Now, I don’t know. It could have been the monster — or it could have been an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese — but long after he’s forgotten it, I’ll remember the night of the monster and how I was the guy who protected him from the thing that scared him. And that’s pretty cool.