A thought during naptime
A sleeping baby is a little bit like an ex-boyfriend. He’s easier to love. Sleep, like time, erases some of the hard edges, the bitter exchanges, his screaming, my anger. I can look at him and feel only the fondness, not the frustration. I remember the good times we had together, not the meltdowns. It’s so much easier to feel connected in retrospect than it is in the middle of it all. Ex-boyfriends, though, get the eliding benefit of absence. They don’t wake, twice a day, cranky and hungry and screaming their displeasure at me. Real relationships are hard to slog through, sometimes. There is fun and playtime, but also tedium, unpleasantness and work. Babies, however, have something critical that ex-boyfriends do not–the ability, in real time, to offer compensating joys for the drudgery.