The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 74: July 22

Today I tried to console my son. He’d gone to sleep and thirty minutes later he’d woken up crying. This happens sometimes — my husband and I think he’s down for the night, and then he awakens in a state. I don’t think there’s anything dangerously wrong with him — tonight he said his ear hurt. Last week he said it was his leg. He sobs and he writhes and he’s inconsolable, and we briefly consider calling the doctor, and then we don’t.

This time I was resentful when he woke up in inexplicable agony because the day had been too long; there had already been too many phases. There was the cleaning phase, during which I organized lightbulbs and tossed modem cords and tried to put away the folded laundry. Then there was the Enforced Outdoor Fun phase, people dragged unhappily around the harbor on a kayak. Then there was the Local Culture phase, involving a trip to a historical society, which more or less looked like the interior of our barn, itself a historical society spanning many more centuries than the one we visited, because ours included deflated beach floaties and broken plastic sleds. Then there was the eating and drinking and socializing phase. Then there was the putting the kids to bed phase, and then the sitting on the couch and watching bad television phase — the phase of which it can sometimes seem all other phases are in service. Everything we do, we do so we can be sitting on this couch watching The Bachelorette.

And then my son woke up.

Soon it became clear that he could not be distracted from his misery fugue state. He would lie awake in his bed and contort and cry for probably an hour, and I would have to rub his back throughout. I tried not to act aggrieved that my final phase had been interrupted. That I was not on the couch watching man after man say, “I’m starting to fall in love with Desiree.” That I was not parsing with my husband the phrase starting to fall. Isn’t the point of falling that it has no prelude or warning, and certainly does not stretch out over the course of many ninety-minute episodes? That it simply happens? That you are suddenly on the ground, having already dropped from a higher altitude to a lower one? I thought of falling as akin to being tackled by a member of the Boston Women’s Rugby Club (this happened to me; I played rugby in college). Women so skilled you didn’t feel the transition from running to lying on your back. One second you were sprinting toward the try line; the next second you were staring at the sky. You were in love with Desiree!

These were the important discussions I was missing while my son sobbed and sobbed. Every situation with a child that irks me, I try not to be irked by thinking: How many more irksome moments like this will I have? My son is four and a half. My hours of rubbing his back while he weeps are numbered. I moved my hand from his shoulder blades to his tailbone, and then I swooped it in reverse. Down up, down up; it was like sharpening a knife, or polishing a bowl. I tried to commit the movement to muscle memory. Whenever I am trapped in a situation, I think of how this entrapment might qualify as work. I am so worried about ever wasting time that I cannot let any small amount of it escape without defining for it a use or a purpose or extracting from it a lasting lesson. I tried to think of how this motion might, in the future, come in handy. I thought, If my son dies, I will sit at the shore, and swoop my hand like this back and forth over a smooth rock that has been warmed in the sun and feels humanlike as a way of remembering him. Then I thought this was melodramatic and gruesome. I thought instead: Maybe I’ll write a story in which a character’s son dies, and she could, as a means of coping, go to the shore and do this. Then I thought this was melodramatic and stupid. I thought instead: I must remember to do this when I am seventy. I must remember to find a rock that feels exactly like my son’s four-year-old back. I must remember to close my eyes and imagine that I am me again, a tired mother trying to teach herself how to miss what is not gone.