When I was a child, I often found myself unable to sleep. I used to lie awake and listen to the way the world spoke at night: cats prowling, birds nesting, dogs barking, windows rattling, doors creaking, wind blowing, rain falling, mosquitoes buzzing. It was only the mosquitoes that disturbed me, because I hated getting bitten and itching all night. The other sounds were amplified by stillness. I was never more a creature than at night, because that was when I listened to voices that weren’t human. They didn’t nag, instruct, advise, or warn. Nor did they express affection, praise, affirmation, or encouragement. In other words, they were different from the human voices in my life. They didn’t make any claim on me, either positive or negative. I still love that aspect of night. It’s when humans get to leave center stage and be part of the chorus.
There was not one reason why I was such a poor sleeper. But there are likely many factors that have played a part in my nocturnal habits. First, there were the mosquitoes. I shared a room with my brother, and the mosquitoes seemed to prefer me; they would torture me all night long. But there was also the fire: On five separate occasions before I turned nine, fire ravaged through the valley behind our house and we had to evacuate in a hurry. At least twice we were in our pajamas when we were rushed out the door. (Then Mum sent us back for our dressing gowns. We may have burnt to a cinder, but at least we’d have been decent. Mum subsequently became a great advocate of flame retardant nightwear, which was hardly a comfort.) Fire often recurred in my dreams; I would sometimes wake and smell for smoke.
In a lifetime of change—growing up, becoming a priest, leaving the Jesuit order after twenty-one years and getting married and starting a family—my issue with sleep was one of the main constants in my life. The year 2004 found me living with my new wife, Jenny, in the tiny town of Gunning, Australia, population just five hundred. By that point, I’d been through the process of diagnosis of sleep apnea, bought a breathing machine, and been fitted for a mask. In the whole of this process, getting a mask that stays in place, doesn’t allow air to escape, and doesn’t cause blisters is the most arduous part.
I’d been using the mask for a while by the time Jenny and I got together, so I was now quite accustomed to sleeping with a large device on my face. I was, however, quite worried how Jenny would take to it. A breathing mask is hardly the most alluring item of intimate apparel. The alternative, I explained to Jenny, was the equivalent of sleeping beside an idling V12 engine. Without this ingenious invention, the product of exhaustive research in the style of Thomas Edison, we’d need not just separate rooms but probably separate houses.
Jenny was so good at overlooking the mask that before long we were expecting our first child, Benedict.
The local doctor in Gunning had a plaque hanging over one of her patient chairs with a message replicated from a time when electric light was still attached to the apron strings of its creator. It read this room is equipped with edison electric light, and it assured the reader that there was no need to put a match to the light and that electricity has no harmful effects. nor does it effect soundness of sleep.
I was studying these words with furrowed brow as our doctor told us, for the second time in two years, that Jenny should make an appointment to see the obstetrician. I studied them again when we returned to the doctor and told her that the obstetrician had squeezed some jelly on Jenny’s belly, dug around in the jelly with something that was connected to a computer, and soon discovered that Jenny was expecting twins.
“That means two babies,” I had responded, dumbstruck.
The obstetrician replied that, yes, she did know what twins meant. She had read about it in med school.
The obstetrician looked at me strangely and then glanced at Jenny with pity. Twins were good news. A difficult husband was not so good. There were a lot of hearts beating in that little room, which was just as well because mine had stopped for a moment.
Jenny and I had plenty of time on the long drive back home to our town to talk things over. The obstetrician had gone though a long list of agonies that could lie ahead. Jenny was told she had a high possibility, even probability, of miscarriage, and if the babies held on to their slender thread, there were other possibilities that were also labeled as risks. By the time we had had something to eat and had passed the last street light of the city, it was already 9:30 and we were safely under cover of dark. It was then that we could both admit that we’d hate to lose either of these tiny creatures. No matter what was involved, we wanted them to come and live with us. I think the night sky of our country town had something to do with that, for big things seldom seem so big when you can see the stars. It doesn’t always feel the same way in the city, a place where darkness has to be artificially created. It has no night sky to keep things in perspective. You can thank Edison for that.
We returned to our local doctor who, other than Edison Electric Light, didn’t have a great deal of gadgetry in her surgery, not even a computer. When we were expecting Benny, the obstetrician would tool around with her ultrasound and tell us that the baby’s length was precisely 14.5 centimeters. She would join her thumbs over Jenny’s belly, reach around with her little fingers, then hold her hands against an old wooden ruler and tell us that the baby was approximately 14.5 centimeters. We were looking forward to surprising her with our news about the twins.
“Oh, I thought so,” she said when we told her. She showed us the record where she had written, five weeks after conception, “Probably twins.” She had made an educated guess based on Jenny’s size.
“That means two babies,” I added, still wondering if there was perhaps a little-known technical definition of the word that might involve fewer nappies and more sleep.
“I know,” she said softly. “Yes, two babies.” She must have gone to the same med school as the obstetrician. “You’ll find that’s quite a lot of babies,” she said.
There were practical considerations to think about while we were expecting our twins. One was that Benedict, now aged sixteen months, was already bringing sweetness and light into our lives. Perhaps a bit too much light. He was progressing wonderfully, a prodigy in every area of accomplishment, a child to make the young Mozart look like a hack. He had already surpassed his old man in both wisdom and maturity. There was only one problem: The meaning of the phrase “a good night’s sleep” eluded him completely. Almost as soon as the obstetrician found two heartbeats in Jenny’s tummy, the prospect of two more sleepless babies entered our minds. The fact that we would soon have to find a bigger house seemed like a mere detail in comparison.
Soon afterward, Jenny’s mother, Coralie, came to visit, and we took advantage of her vast experience as a babysitter to go to the movies. We looked in the paper and found there was a 10:15 PM showing at the theater down the road. We live on a long road. Times were, in another life, when going to the movies was no big deal for either of us. We both went a lot back then. It was something you could do on your own without fear of being pitied by some couples or envied by others; in those days, a 10:15 PM movie was where we were most likely to run into friends with whom we’d go to supper afterward and drink strong coffee. Sleep was a resource we could just squander. Now the nearest movie house was thirty miles away and a 10:15 PM session felt decadent.
There were numerous advantages to living in a small town. Gunning now had a population of 504, although most afternoons, you’d wonder where they all were. It wasn’t long before we were telling our neighbors and friends that, once the twins arrived, our little family would constitute 1 percent of the population. There would have to be 80,000 of us to have the same demographic impact in New York, and it’s hard to find an apartment that size in Manhattan. A town that never sleeps is, of course, one that never wakes either. Our village didn’t have this problem. It dozed on and off in its patched pajamas, stirring every now and then to remark that things weren’t what they used to be. I was looking forward to days ahead when our 1 percent could swing a close vote on some crucial municipal issue, such as the size of garbage bins or pool opening hours.
The other advantage of living beyond earshot of a city is that Jenny and I got a lot of time to talk in the car. We left Benny still wide-awake with his grandma to give ourselves time to get to the late screening.
“What’s the name of the movie?” Jenny asked on the way.
“Sorry. I didn’t check.”
“I just hope it’s not too noisy. I need the sleep.”
Our talk soon turned to Benny and how we were going to get him to go to bed more willingly. We had tried everything the books and some well-meaning strangers told us; none of it worked. The latest advice we’d been given urged us to establish a clear and calm bedtime routine, something like a ritual, so that Benny would learn to recognize signals that the day was ready to close for business and he might kindly now make his way to the exit. If the ritual included quiet things he enjoyed, such as reading books and saying good night to his numerous teddies, then, we were led to believe, we would find that Benny welcomed the end of the day. Benny might not welcome it, but we certainly would.
The film we saw that night was about the writer J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.
At one point in the film, the actor playing Barrie says, “It’s a terrible thing to put a boy to bed, because when he wakes up, he will be one day older.”
Jenny and I both started sobbing.
When we got home, we found Benny still awake, but grandma sound asleep in front of the TV. She had had five children of her own. She knew what to do.
We nursed Benedict for a while, and we talked about the kind of world our three children would grow up in. We wondered what the future would hold for our little ones, both Benedict and the two on their way. We knew they would need us to hold them. But they also needed to be cradled within a culture, a civilization, a pillow of language and ideas on which they could lay their heads, a blanket of beliefs that would shelter them from the cold.