Friends told us were lucky because both boys had slept through the night by the tender age of three months old. I could still recall the first night Galen slept without waking from ten P.M. to seven A.M. Katherine and I blinked at each other in the soft morning light as if we’d both emerged from separate comas, certain we’d failed to hear the baby-snatcher breaking the front window and escaping with our twelve-week-old son in his arms. When we went into his room, there he was, lips puckered and palms near his face. Two years later, Hayden squeaked in for the record at eleven weeks. It seemed we had accomplished the impossible. Twice.
Truth was, luck had little to do with it. From the beginning I’d approached the battle for sleep with the deadeye grit of a field commander. With Katherine juggling nights in the emergency room and the second year of her master’s degree, and me hammering away at my doctoral thesis while teaching and editing a literary journal, our choices were clear: sleep or die. The day we brought each boy home from the hospital, we set about implementing a rigid schedule: thirty minutes of eating followed by an hour of playtime, generally consisting of the baby watching Katherine or me shower or run the vacuum, terminating in a ninety-minute nap. The cycle repeated every three hours. The goal was to get as much milk down the hatch during the feeding time and then keep the baby awake until it digested, at which point he’d be as desperate for shut-eye as a long-haul trucker. Laying the boys in their cribs, sleep took hold with such force that I could have run a table saw in the nursery. Teaching a baby to eat and sleep this way was a little like stopping for gas every hundred miles on a cross-country road trip, which is to say tedious and maybe a little overkill, but by God, it worked. After about six weeks, the boys’ stomachs had expanded to the point that a full belly could carry them half the night. Six weeks later they made it the whole night, and Katherine and I rejoined the cast of The Young and the Rested.
I was sure I’d stumbled onto a secret others needed to know about. I tried to convert every baby-toting or pregnant adult I met to our method, though, to my honest-to-God surprise, very few moms were eager to hear a guy philosophize about the virtues of sleep scheduling. My fellow college professors, vanguards of rationality, logic, and scientific methodology turned downright hostile toward any program smacking of rigidity or routine, as though nine consecutive hours of sleep would dampen their child’s creativity and future brilliance. I took the hint and yielded the pulpit, preferring instead to judge other zombie-faced parents in silence, gleefully picturing them pacing their hallways at all hours of the night while I floated on waves of bountiful, lustful, uninterrupted sleep.
In hindsight I can see how I was primed for a comeuppance.
Galen would occasionally break his cycle, wake up when he should have been asleep, and cry to be let out. If this tactic worked one time, as it often did, he expected it to work forever. The pediatrician told us it was okay to let him cry himself back to sleep; he’d tire himself out in forty-five minutes to an hour. Galen, though, had the lungs to go much longer. As long as I could get the television loud enough, I could deal with the noise, but Katherine hated hearing her baby cry. One night the crying lasted so long that she drove to the liquor store and came home with a pack of cigarettes and a box of wine. Our elderly Mormon neighbor led her dog into her yard to pee, saw Katherine smoking on the front stoop with a beer stein of Chablis by her foot while Galen’s wails echoed through the front door, and called out, “Stay strong, Sister! Don’t you dare go in there!” Two hours later, after nearly four hours of near-constant howling, Galen threw in the towel. The next night we were back on schedule.
Hayden was more interested in escape than protest. It was here that our troubles began.
He was two the first time he sprang himself from his crib. When I say “sprang,” I mean it literally: He gripped the crib and bounced until he worked up enough height to vault the rail like a cop going over a fence in pursuit of a suspect. His bedroom was directly above the living room, so Katherine and I could hear his crib squeaking as he jumped and the ensuing thud when he landed. To lessen the threat of injury, I laid a spare mattress on the floor beside the crib to break his fall. The crash pad only encouraged him. He went over the rail backward, like a high-jumper, or headfirst with his hands at his sides. Once I caught him standing on the corner rails like a pro wrestler on the turnbuckles of a ring. “Stop!” I yelled, but Hayden shot me a wild-eyed Hulk Hogan look, and jumped.
The worst part wasn’t the jump. Had Hayden leapt from his bed to play with the toys in his room, I might have let it slide. The problem was that once he was out of bed, he wanted our undivided attention. Most nights he showed up about sixty seconds after I’d poured a drink and had settled into the couch. It was only then I’d hear the ceiling creak and the dull clonk of his weight against the floor. We’d pause the show while one of us led Hayden back upstairs, holding his hand on the staircase because he insisted on walking himself, laying him in his crib with the satiny side of his blankie against his cheek, the way he liked it, before tip-toeing, Elmer-Fudd-hunting-wabbits-style, back downstairs.
Five minutes later, he was back.
By his first year of preschool, I was going up and down the stairs a dozen times a night. A single thirty-minute show stretched to hours. On many nights Katherine and I gave up and went to bed with eight minutes left in the episode because we were too exhausted with parental rage to finish it.
We moved Hayden out of his crib and into a big-boy bed so one of us could lie with him until he fell asleep. He knew that once he drifted off we were going to leave him, and he managed to outlast us. I lost entire evenings to lying in the dark on the edge of a twin bed the size of a locker room bench, my ankles crossed and my hand on the floor to keep me from falling off, bored and irritated as hell, hostage to a four-year-old’s stubborn refusal to shut his eyes.
Something had to change.
Hayden’s room was on the same floor as the other two bedrooms, but was tucked beneath the eaves of the roof overlooking the front yard. It had originally been used as an attic. Due to the pitch of the ceiling, his door opened outward, into the hallway. My first attempt at keeping him inside involved wedging his door shut with an old pair of Teva sandals, the original square-strapped model favored by hacky sackers and river guides. I’d had the sandals since college, when I briefly fancied myself a student of the footbag, and for whatever reason I’d never thrown them out. I pressed the toe beneath Hayden’s door and worked the rubber back and forth to cram it into place. I got the sandals so far in that the heels lifted off the floor. At first it worked perfectly. The knob turned, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Is anyone there?” Hayden called through the wood.
“It’s bedtime. We’ll play tomorrow.”
“Don’t leave me, Daddy.” The knob spun left and right. I heard him panting as he pushed against the door. I backed down the stairs. I kept a pint of Italian gelato hidden in a plastic sack at the back of the freezer where no one else could find it. To the victor go the spoils.
I’m no physicist, but in theory the more Hayden pushed on the door, the more the wedge should have locked into place. I underestimated his hunger for freedom, however. He kept his shoulder pressed to the door until he’d managed to slide the shoes back a mere two inches. It turned out to be all the space he needed.
“I’m here!” he said, when he bounded downstairs. His face was red from pressing against the wood, and drenched in sweat, which I actually think worked as a kind of lube. His eyes fell to the bowl of ice cream in my lap. “Hey!” he said. “Where you’d get that?”
No matter how far I pushed the sandals beneath the door, Hayden found a way to fly the coop. A part of me suspected he was an octopus, with hydrostatic bones that could flatten to get through almost any seam. After a few months he’d worn the carpet beneath his door down to the threads, and the sandal wedge was useless. I spent an hour on YouTube learning how to secure an outward-opening door with rope. I tied a long piece of nylon cord around his doorknob, looped it around the other knobs in the hallway, then ran the whole thing back to the banister rail where I fastened it with a trucker’s hitch knot. The cord was so taut it hummed when I plucked it, and the hallway looked like the laser maze in a bank-heist movie. Hayden beat it in less than two minutes. Next, I stacked laundry baskets full of clothes and books in front of the door, and when he knocked those over, I tried a toy chest. Walking through my neighborhood one day I spotted an old wood-and-velvet chair on the street, a sheaf of paper with the word FREE taped to the cushion. I carried it home precisely because it looked like I might be able to brace it against Hayden’s door. It worked okay until the night I forgot to move the chair out of the hallway before going to bed. I tripped over it in the middle of the night, hitting my face on the wall and breaking two of the chair’s legs. I carried it back to the curb in the morning, and by the time I came home from work, it was gone.
“How do we keep him in there?” I asked Katherine the next night. I’d given the sandals another shot, this time with a second pair beneath the first. It was at best a wad of chewing gum on a leaky pipe, and as we sat together on the couch we could hear Hayden working the doorknob, the unmistakable screech of the brass. We needed something strong to hold him in. A padlock seemed barbaric, but at this point all options were on the table.
“Why won’t he go to sleep?” Katherine said. She tipped her head forward and began massaging her temples. “He’s four years old. He makes English muffin pizzas and pipe-cleaner animals all day. This can’t be so hard.” She stood up on the coffee table and yelled at the ceiling, “Go to sleep!”
“No!” Hayden called back.
I sat thinking. No matter what I put in front of the door, Hayden found a way to move it.
He only needed an inch. Less than an inch. If he could get a finger between the door and the jamb, he could weasel his way out. I needed something that spanned the entire hallway and kept the door firmly shut. Like a refrigerator or a bank safe.
“Maybe you could get a piece of wood or something,” Katherine proposed. “Like people put in the tracks of their sliding glass doors.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” I said. That was when it hit me: the idea I still number among my most elegant parenting innovations. I had an old shower curtain rod in the basement, leftover from our bathroom renovation. It had rubber feet on both ends, so it wouldn’t gouge the door or the baseboard, and an internal spring-loaded screw that allowed the rod to be shortened or extended to almost any size. I found it leaning against the back wall of the storage closet and ran upstairs with it, like Lancelot wielding his lance. I kicked out the sandals and squeezed the bar between Hayden’s bedroom door and the baseboard across the hallway. It snugged perfectly into place.
Hayden ran at the door. It didn’t budge an inch. “Let me out,” he called.
Unable to move the door with his shoulder, Hayden lay on his floor, lifted his feet to the wood, and tried to hip-sled it open. The door inched back ever so slightly, enough for me to see Hayden’s determined face, his gritted teeth and eyes narrowed to dagger points, before the rod’s spring-loaded action pushed the door shut again. He pushed again, harder and faster. The shower rod began to groan like a box spring in a cheap motel; the door appeared to breathe as it pulsed open and shut. But the bar held. At last the pumping stopped, and I held my breath, waiting for it to start up again. “I’m stuck in here!” Hayden said.
“The only way out is through your dreams, kid.”
“It’s not fair!”
“You’re right, it’s not,” I said.
Katherine and I were sitting on the couch, enjoying our drinks with the TV turned up loud enough to drown out the porno squeak echoing through the ceiling, when through the front window I caught sight of a woman walking her dog along the sidewalk. While the dog sniffed the grass, the woman turned and stared up at the house. It was then that I noticed several of Hayden’s stuffed animals lying on the grass. A pair of green-and-orange underpants cascaded to the ground as gently as an autumn maple leaf.
I muted the TV and heard Hayden’s voice above me. “I’m trapped!” he called from his window. He’d pushed out the bottom of his screen. More underwear rained down. “They put the bar in and won’t let me out.”
I went to the door. “It’s okay,” I said to the woman. “He has a hard time staying in his room.”
“You use a bar to keep him in?” she asked, frowning.
“It’s a shower curtain rod, actually,” I said.
The woman scowled and pulled her dog, midstream, away from my lawn. I thought to call after her, “We take it out once he falls asleep!” but that sounded like a weird thing to yell to a stranger. And anyway, she was already two houses away. I hurried to gather up the drawers and dolls and carry them back inside.
Katherine had grown concerned. “This is so ridiculous,” she said. “I’m a social worker. This is the kind of thing we tell parents never to do. How long is this going to last?”
“Not very long,” I said. I reminded her of the period when Galen got out of bedtime by throwing up. He did it at first to get attention, but he soon grew to enjoy taking three baths a night, the fresh sheets every forty-five minutes. After a few weeks, I covered his mattress and floor with towels and told him that he could barf all he wanted but no one was coming to get him. Two nights of sleeping in puke was enough to persuade him. He hadn’t thrown up in bed since. In fact, Galen could sleep through almost anything, though thunderstorms and dogs barking and train whistles. Even through his brother’s incessant racket.
“Now that Hayden can’t get out, I’m sure he’ll get the picture pretty fast,” I said. “I give it a week, two at the most.”
Six years later, the bar remains in use.
It’s become a family secret, the fact that we have a child with adult teeth, his own iPod and library card, a ten-year-old who can stay home alone, walk unaccompanied to and from school, and bake a birthday cake with only minimal supervision, but who will not stay in his room at night without the steely encouragement of a repurposed shower curtain rod. Hayden’s face grows red with embarrassment whenever the bar is mentioned, and his brother is forbidden from ever speaking about it. We’ve tried to do away with the thing. We’ve bargained for extended bedtimes, extra dessert, privileges surpassing a young boy’s age and station. We’ve shaken hands on more deals than a used-car salesman. Once Katherine even drafted a contract and we all signed it. But as soon as the bar comes out, the old pattern returns. Hayden’s downstairs ten times a night because he needs a drink of water, a Band-Aid, a cough drop, an ibuprofen; he needs to tell us about his dream, even though he hasn’t been upstairs long enough to sleep; he’s finished his book and needs another from the shelf in the basement; he needs a dollar for school next the day. Pretty soon we’re threatening the bar again. Pretty soon we’re using it.
A few years ago, Katherine and I left the boys in the care of a babysitter, one of my students from the college, so we could attend a dinner party. Arriving at the party, I handed my jacket to the host, absentmindedly leaving my phone in the pocket. When I went back for it a few hours later, I found I’d missed five calls, all from the same number. I called the babysitter in a panic, and she answered in tears. I started tugging on my jacket while I worked to calm her down. All I wanted to know: Do we need to rush home or meet you at the hospital?
“It’s Hayden!” she blubbered. “He won’t respect me.”
“What’d he do?”
“I’ve put him to bed like a million times, but he keeps coming out.”
“Oh,” I said, relieved. I lowered my voice and told her where she could find the bar, at the back of Hayden’s closet, and explained how to secure it into place. I whispered conspiratorially, “It’s the only way,” and crossed my fingers she wouldn’t start Snapchatting pictures of the rod to her friends.
The babysitter agreed to try it, but begrudgingly. “You left me in charge,” she said. “He should respect that.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” I said, “he’s no easier for his mom and me.”
“It doesn’t,” she said, and hung up.
Katherine looked up as I settled back into my seat at the table and asked if everything was okay. I must have reassured her too loudly because the host raised his eyebrows and asked, “Trouble at home?”
“Thing Two won’t stay in bed,” I said.
Thus commenced a round of raucous, wine-fueled storytelling about parental low points. The host had once spanked his now-adult son in front of his mother-in-law, after which Grandma had looked at him warily for years. Another woman’s daughter had peed in her dress in front of the church during her baby sister’s baptism and had to be carried, screaming and dripping, from the ceremony. Katherine looked at me and mouthed, Don’t you dare, but of course I did. I told them all about the sandals, the rope and chair, the inspiration for the shower rod, the dog walker Hayden called to for help. I was on my third glass of wine, and I spared no detail.
I’d been yammering for a while when I stopped to take stock of the table. I was glad to see several people laughing, but down at the other end one woman—who had only daughters and at previous gatherings scowled at the boys the way Bichon Frise owners look at German Shepherds—glowered across the empty glasses, tight-lipped and stern, as though every bad thing she’d ever suspected of me had just been proven true. Katherine stared down at her napkin spread across her lap. The ride home wasn’t going to be much fun.
The problem, from Katherine’s point of view, was that the bar (as we have affectionately come to call it) made us look like bad parents. Impatient at best, cruel at worst. Parents were already so judgmental of one another. In her years as a social worker, especially in pediatrics and maternity, Katherine had seen a lot of women, and more than a few men, shamed by other likely well-intentioned parents for bottle- rather than breastfeeding, for co-sleeping or not co-sleeping, for letting their kids watch TV or play with balloons at a birthday party. For every decision you made as a parent, someone was waiting to tell you it was the absolute worst thing to have done and that you were morally corrupt for having done it.
Katherine didn’t believe me, but I hadn’t told the story of the shower rod simply to score a cheap laugh. A part of me was actually proud of the bar, not because I had thought of it or because I’d finally solved the riddle of keeping Hayden inside his room, but because of what it symbolized. So much of the talk about kids, whether about school or sports, musical aptitude or kindness toward animals, clustered around the notions of talent and gifts, as though success in life depended on a magical power descending from heaven. I understand the desire, but I don’t buy it. I’ll take grit over genius any day, and my son has grit to burn. He’s squared off against his mother and me for most of his young life, and he hasn’t once backed down. He’s as stubborn as a mule, but I’ll give it to him: He doesn’t tire easily, and he doesn’t readily admit defeat. I hope these qualities will make him strong, and that his nightly assaults against the bar are teaching him to fight—against me for now, but one day, I hope, for causes that really matter.
The babysitter waited with her purse in her lap and her backpack by the door. I paid her and drove her back to campus. At home, Katherine was on the couch with a glass of water. She wasn’t ready to talk to me yet. The babysitter had, as instructed, installed the bar, and it was still in place. “That you, Dad?” Hayden called down. I heard the bar begin to squeak, its telltale protest. Hayden’s refusal to go gentle into that good night. “Let me out,” he called.
“I’ll be up soon,” I said to the ceiling, but what I wanted to say was, Don’t give up, kid. Keep fighting.