It happened again this weekend: the sound from the other bedroom that stirs me from my light and none-too-easily-attained slumber; a progression from whine to weep to wail as The Husband and I lie in wait, trying to interpret the urgency and looking into the monitor and wondering if this means our parenting pagers are going off, or if he’ll calm back down on his own. He has his thumb, after all. Can’t that be enough?

For two nights, it wasn’t. Two nights: which meant I had a chance to do it all wrong, then get redeemed.

When the alarm sounds, the thoughts fly around like bullets in my head–an apt simile, considering the threats I’ve taken against my own life at times like these. Chief among them is the whine of my own: WHY? Why can’t our offspring stick to the schedule we trained into him? Why can’t I ever get a good night’s sleep, even when he does stick to that schedule? Then I usually drop the F bomb and, if the crying persists, TH makes an attempt to calm him down and is met with urgent head movements toward an absent boob. And so he is re-delivered to me, as he was the day he was born when I was much more well-rested, and he feeds, wide-eyed at 2 am.

But that was only the dress rehearsal. The next night he repeated his performance and I began to lose hope. I remembered internet postings about sleep regression–community forums are where fear goes to take a dump–and I felt the anxiety clenching my hands as The Kid was headed toward me. And I thought:

When did all of this stop being a blessing?

Middle-of-the-night family meetings, TH beside me and TK in my arms, and there will be a time when I’ll look back and ache for it. Which is not to say that the reality of sleeplessness doesn’t royally suck, BUT: there’s a baby in my arms, as previously noted. And an aforementioned man beside me. And they happen to be my two favorite people. Surely I can take a second of my sleepless state to see that? Because the thing is, we’re going to survive these wake-up calls, no matter how many they are, so this is not a life-or-death situation we’ve got here. In fact, it’s just a life situation. As in, this is where life is. Now.

That second night, I got my lines right. I said thank you. I chose to trust that whatever I needed for the next day would not be taken away in these moments, but would show up like it always does. Since when, after all, do I have the right to start hacking away at the Divine character–to begin reassigning it qualities that look more like me?

I opened my eyes to meet TK’s. He looked straight at me, then clenched my finger. The only clenching worth having around here. The next day, he laughed for the first time. And that night, he found his thumb.