June 4, 2014 Article

The Old Coot’s favorite four words: “slept through the night.”

By Merlin Lessler

There was a new mom with her baby at the Rotary meeting the other day. Couldn’t have been more than a month or two old. Never made a peep! On the way out the door I heard the mother (Donna Townsend’s daughter) say in a jubilant voice, “She slept through the night twice this week. Those are special words, slept through the night, when you have a new baby in the house. If you’re a parent, you never forget the magic of that moment in your child’s development.

I remember when our first-born made it through the night like it was yesterday. And I remember it for each successive child. I was born too late to duck out on middle of the night baby duties. The dads in the generation that came before me weren’t required to play a big role in childcare. It was a woman’s thing for the most part. Not so with my generation. We were expected to share in the duties that came with having babies. We thought of it as a 50-50 deal, us men, but if you actually run the numbers it was more like 20-80. But still and all, I did my part, taking turns getting up in the night to feed and change the baby. And, after that stage, to respond to their screams when they had a bad dream on an inflamed eardrum.  

Today, I have a different appreciation for those four beautiful words, “slept through the night.”  This time it isn’t the baby that gets high praise for pulling it off. It’s me. Old coots have a lot in common with newborns. Prime among them is our inability to sleep through the night. It doesn’t take much to make an old coot’s slumber a restless one. Our minds work overtime the minute our heads hit the pillow: Did I leave the window down in the car? – Did I forget to let the cat in? – Will I oversleep and be late for my doctor’s appointment? We drive ourselves nuts with useless fretting. Thankfully, we don’t need as much sleep as normal people and especially as much as teenagers, who think getting up before noon on a non-school day is considered cruel and unusual punishment, as embodied in the 8^th amendment of the U.S. constitution.

I did it, slept through the night, twice this year. It’s one of those things you remember when it happens so seldom: January 31^st and April 17^th. I could really relate to the thrill the new mom at the Rotary meeting felt when she bragged about her daughter sleeping through the night. Just thinking about it will probably wake me up several times tonight. But, that’s OK; I’m used to it.