To forestall insomnia, I don’t count sheep, but I do sleep with one. His name is BaaBaa O’Riley, and he’s the color of creamy coffee. Slightly smaller than a volleyball, he tucks nicely under my arm. He reigns in his own universe — the Universe of the Infinitely Huggable. It is a kingship I imagine him winning in a three-way cage-match against the Snuggle fabric-softener bear and giggly Pillsbury doughboy.
It regularly occurs to me that maybe I’m a child trapped in the hardening taffy mold that is an adult’s increasingly cranky body. I sleep with toys and I bestow comical names upon objects. Call it a coping strategy, one of many.
After all, how many partnered-up midlife adults — this one well over 40 — still sleep with a stuffed animal? Curiosity makes me look it up (I’ve perhaps had too much high-quality sleep lately; huzzah for Prozac), and I discover not only that it populates as the first choice in Google, but that it’s more common than I thought, albeit maybe not so much in my age bracket.
I sleep with toys and I bestow comical names upon objects. Call it a coping strategy, one of many.
Although I’m not prepared to blame the pandemic for the cuddlable sheep I count on to sleep, I did first acquire my current soft companion in 2022, at least so far as I can figure. But there have been others over the years. Not counting a body pillow that rescued many a pregnancy-induced toss-and-turn fest. There was Alf (the alien) doll, a piebald Pound Puppy, a joke toy called a “Dammit Doll” (used more as voodoo doll than sleep buddy), and an oversized stuffed Kewpie-like creature (at least the hairstyle was) with flagrantly yellow cotton candy-scented, flame-shaped hair.
Too kinetic to be contained at night — perhaps a life metaphor — I now prefer to control my bed-based fluffdom and its current “shleeping” inhabitant. On a “baaaad night,” at least for my partner, I run or kick out in my sleep or adopt an arrested starfish posture, with BaaBaa nestled into my side. Covers can be snatched faster than Black Friday discounts at the Apple store, and just as viciously, albeit without any recall on my part. Alas, I cannot even blame Ambien.
In the end, I’m grateful for that sweet opiate, sleep, and this rowdy power of naming, even of inanimate objects.
BaaBaa joins a motley crew of the seen-and-named, most of them lost to locations and timelines elsewhere than this. Gone are Stevia Nicks, a beautiful flowering plant in my former herb garden, improbably placed next to Chive Barker, which appropriately grew like impaling spikes; Mork and Mindy, my first childhood cats (whom I personally named, with apologies to Eliot for my brevity); and Asparagus Lips, my fifth-grade boy tormentor, Jason.
As for life situations, they’re as much a bitch to live through as to name. If my only sibling died at birth, how on earth do I answer all those “do you have any brothers or sisters” classification questions on medical forms and in small-but-not-minute talk with acquaintances and colleagues? Naming, as a portal to communicating, understanding, and dealing with issues from kerfuffles to genuine crises only goes so far.
In my experience, categorizing and compartmentalizing skips up to the threshold of parenthood (as just one example) then collapses on the cold floor of reality, a kind of jilted bride.
The thread begins to be lost at the get-go, with the quite-literal act of naming.
Even before a child is born, the twine must be juggled, a precarious negotiation in multiple dimensions. To be a parent is to be a time-traveler; you vicariously project yourself forward in time along with your hoped-for progeny and the tagalong dreams for them.
In short, the game of naming children is another gnarly, snarling beast altogether. How do you forever — or at least the first 16 years or so — saddle a person with a place-holder, an arrested instant in time, a pigeon-holed label that can be as inaccurate as just about anything on this good Earth? My eldest child found a way around this parental hubris. It required only changing names and pronouns as soon as legally viable. He’s on about his 11th name change (“no cap” as the kiddos would say), one legal and the others preferential, while, meanwhile, we parents are on our 19th nervous breakdown, to steal from The Stones.
This I name Futility, as I lay me down to sleep, saying my agnostic’s prayer: Please let my demon-haunted child find peace somehow, some way, somewhere.
The breakdowns and mistake-making began on the birthing bed, or even before. From premature contractions stilled only by off-label asthma medications to an emergency C-section, his entry into the world has been more brawl than “awwww.”
Cuteness aside, even after the bona fide laboring, it turns out that parenting is sorta difficult.
About a week prior to this essay’s initial genesis, our oldest chameleon ran away from home for the third time. (But who’s counting?) I thought this one might “take,” unfortunately, and dreaded finding him face-down in a nearby pond or frozen to death near our apartment. After an argument over school, (non)attendance, he fled with just a thick comforter and was wearing shorts and a T-shirt (as today’s teen is wont to do, even in what passes for winter in the Year of Our Climate Change 2024).
The first go-’round, not even the police bloodhound managed to locate him, shrouded as he was somewhere in the brambles or huddled in a culvert. He wouldn’t ‘fess up where his hidey-hole lay.
Knowing that sometimes words don’t behave, won’t cooperate, and outright fail applies scant poultice to the pain and uncertainty of parenting a child. Whether that child is “normal” (whatever the hell that is) or not.
I know we parents can’t say or do anything to contain him much longer to this, our world. If we ever could.
This I name Futility, as I lay me down to sleep, saying my agnostic’s prayer:
Please let my demon-haunted child find peace somehow, some way, somewhere.
Even in a world without me.
