Midnight Feeding

                                        Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

‘Sleep’ is the one word connecting every new parent. The crash came unexpectedly. Post partum; my baby girl’s mom unable to differentiate hallucinations and reality. None of us slept that night. In healthy situations its hard to come by.  Ours wasn’t healthy. My daughter had it rough that first year. Mom was hospitalized with psychotic episodes. I worked two jobs. Psych meds and the hospitalization meant breastfeeding was out. Coming home at midnight the one a.m. feeding fell to me.

Bottle feeding is a long process. My daughter was more about the sip than the swig. Feed than sleep, that’s the cycle. This night I’d lay her down; she’d start crying. Pick her up, she’d stop. Not normal, she’s sick.

 I lay down on the carpet, Sweet Pea on my chest. She is calm. Her frailty nestles in my arms; my frail self holding her. Both curled up in stronger arms. I speak to myself with a conviction I don't know I possess, “This is what love looks like. This is fatherhood.”

Alzheimer's and Sunrise

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

Seeing dad hurl his walker left a permanent impression on my daughter. Not an aide he threw it at, or a maid, no, he flung the thing at his wife. He was too cold, or too hot. The thermostat wasn’t set to his liking. Blood boiling, he threw the walker. Emotional responses in the brain are a factor in Alzheimer’s.   

No surprise then when the walker went flying. Haywire physical outbursts wove their way through dad’s story. Still, there were windows of warm openness in his later years. These seemed to be on the increase as he entered his sixties. Full change never came. The demons and dementia kept the edge.

One of those windows of calm opened with my dad, in his home. Watching old westerns on an old TV. Hard the silence when the TV wasn’t on. He said something. I asked something. Years past merged into yesterday. A painful break-up: she dumped him. High-school wound remembered. The window; open.

To get my dad to talk is tough. Casting scattered pics of his life as a teenager to the present day. Jumbling together snapshots from his life and others. He wasn’t in New York on 9/11 but thought he was. He spoke of a bad break-up with a girl in high school. A picture I hadn’t seen, a story I’d never heard.

A lifetime in; still I didn’t know my father. “What kept you going,” I asked. “The sun rises every morning,” he said. God’s mercies brighten the coming day. Bad as it got, could it be, that this tethered to some sanity?

There is a witness to good in the universe, to beauty in creation. Seeking this good enables us to keep at life. For life will throw much at us that is neither good nor beautiful. Basking in beauty; nature, music and the arts opens the heart to hope. Losing sight of these we will find ourselves hurling much more than walkers.