Reading in Bed

I have a bad habit of thinking two-day-old rituals are about to change my life.

Just resting her eyes

My husband is out tonight, and I’d planned to take an edible and watch a grisly true-crime documentary during my alone time—a simultaneous chilling and revving of my flight-or-fight system; an attempt at reaching some sort of equilibrium. Instead, I found a different kind of nirvana. I’ve spent the last hour in my daughter’s squeaky twin bed, snuggled against her like a sardine, and—this is the nirvana part—quietly reading my book as she reads hers and then falls asleep next to me. Can you imagine?? The choir of angels I heard singing when I first unlocked this new parenting level??? 

I have a bad habit of thinking two-day-old rituals are about to change my life, but I can say with certainty that this one will stick for as long as she’ll stand me lying next to her. It’s so sweet and peaceful and precious that I’m already grieving its end. 

As we read together I can hear her mouthing the longer words, sounding them out in exaggerated syllables. I marvel at her powerful brain, which learned how to read in just one school year; how do these kids have any energy at all with all that we ask of them? Eventually she gives into the first-grade fatigue, puts her book down, curls herself against me and says, “I’m just resting my eyes.”

“Do you want me to stay?” I ask, and she always quickly says yes. I can’t believe we ever denied her this core pleasure of falling asleep next to a parent. 

Her muscles twitch as she drifts off, like a car popping and clicking in the garage after a long drive. Tonight, she shifted in a dream and laid her perfect hand on my arm, and if I wasn’t sure that I needed to record this moment I’d still be next to her, letting her even breaths and my good book settle like a mist over my anxious brain. 

I didn’t watch any true crime, I didn’t eat a gummy, I didn’t scroll my phone. It turns out that all I needed was this: lying next to my seven-year-old as she cuddled the pink bunny she received when she was still curled up in my belly, when words weren’t necessary, when the only language she knew was the popping and clicking of her powerful body as it grew in mine.