I was surprised at the amount of kinetic energy wasted in putting a baby to sleep. When my kids were small, I would pace in a purposefully un-gaited trot, patting their butts with enough force to exorcise whatever foul demon burp was haunting their night. Had I moved in a straight path, I would have easily crossed several state lines. But instead, the movement was more like a tango, three steps to the right, three to the left, with my baby clutched to my chest, little eyes rolling around their heads as they tried in vain to stave off the pull of sleep.

The first three months of life are easy. I can palm my little pooping, gaseous sack of growing meat for hours without breaking a sweat. They’re small with movement limited to the periodic thrust of an arm or slow-mo kick of a leg. The crying matches. It’s untrained and ineffective, serving only to alert me that there is an impending mystery to be solved. It is after they break that first trimester that things get tricky. It’s like they suddenly come alive. What was a pitiful mewing transforms into a powerful wail with purpose and more than a little anger. By a year, they are at full fighting weight, lean and mean, ready to join in battle and sleep is their enemy. That is where my particular skill sets come into play. I am the night shift. And I say these words with reverberating voice and a billowing cape made out of shadow and dream. Night shift. My wife can deal with all of the diurnal drama but when the sun goes down she punches out as I clock in.

As I am writing this, it is 3:30 in the morning and my youngest, a huge behemoth of a boy, sprawls on me like I am some recliner designed only for his comfort. He lays facing away from me, eyes heavily lidded, and watches the play of shadow in the darkened house. He doesn’t want to sleep. I do not know why because I sure want to. There are no extra lights on, no television, nothing that would cause distraction. It is time for peace. A little trick that I learned long ago is that anxious parents have anxious children and anxious children do not sleep. So I hold my son and breathe, matching my breath with his, and I can feel him settle into me as our rhythms synchronize into some filial Zen state.