When Julia was eighteen months old, Hurricane Irene hit New York City on a hot summer day in August. The thought of a hurricane in the Northeast was unnerving enough for me to forget all of the lessons Michael Bloomberg had tried to teach me over the years. I panicked, filled the bathtub up with water, and began hunting and gathering for supplies (I sprinted to the nearest toy store, frantic that I’d have to entertain a toddler for days with no television). My husband turned to me and said, “This is New York. I’ll bet you a million dollars that there will be guys on bikes delivering takeout one hour after the storm passes.” Shortly after the wind died down and the sun came back out, the three of us walked outside to see if any trees fell in Central Park. Within minutes, a man pedaled past with two plastic bags of Chinese food hanging from the handlebars. From then on, when there’s been a blizzard or wayward hurricane in the forecast, I’ve tried to channel the common sense of Mayor Bloomberg. Don’t worry about the logistics. Stay home, read a good book, watch a movie, just take it easy. If you get hungry, order takeout.
Bloomberg was also my gateway drug to the Democratic Party. As mayor he started out as a Republican. Then he was an Independent. Now he’s a Democrat. He has views that would fall on both sides of the political spectrum, which just seems realistic. He has issues he puts his weight behind—gun control, the environment—and it doesn’t seem that he cares too much which team he’s on, as long as they’re moving the ball forward on things he feels are important. When I started writing this book, he had flirted with the idea of running for president but never followed through. By the time I was finishing it, he’d entered the 2020 race; a few months later, he dropped out. I attributed all of those steps to his common sense. He saw an opportunity, then saw the door close, and then used his bajillions of dollars to support the person who bested him. He was consistently the best-dressed candidate. My husband always said that when the rubber met the road, not enough people would get on board for a rich Jewish guy from New York. He might have been right, but I just think they needed to listen to him talk about salting roads. It always worked for me.
HARRY BURNS
Here I go again with someone I’ve never met. Worse, he’s a fictional character. Double worse, I’m not even sure he’s Jewish.
Let’s back up. For years, I simply assumed that Harry in When Harry Met Sally was a Jew. In my mind, when he is standing across from Sally at Jess and Marie’s wedding, he’s wearing a yarmulke. I was sure of it. And then, a few days ago, I watched the movie again and realized that:
No yarmulke.
There’s absolutely no mention of Harry’s religion at all.
He uses some Yiddish words and eats at Katz’s Deli, but so do a lot of people.
All of this time, I’ve been projecting Billy Crystal’s Jewishness onto Harry.
I actually may be in love with Billy Crystal.
No matter. I’m pretty sure Harry Burns is Jewish, and I love him. He taught me a lot of life lessons in the early 1990s. Remember the scene where Harry and Sally finally sleep together? Of course you do. It changes the whole trajectory of the movie. Want to know what I remember from that scene? How it is still night outside when they’re finished. How she goes to the kitchen to get a glass of water, smiling at the possibilities opened up by what just happened, and there’s no morning light streaming in through the window. How Harry is lying in bed, flipping through her alphabetized card catalog of movies with the bedside lamp on, as one does when it’s dark out. How she asks, “Do you want to go to sleep?” and he says, “Sure.” And they do. That scene in When Harry Met Sally was the first crack in my ironclad theory I’d held since junior high school that sex took all night. Why would they go to sleep? Was it an early morning nap? I wondered. And then I moved on, still confused, like a baby who can’t figure out how to get the top off of a cup and eventually tosses the whole thing under the couch. But deep in the fallow field of my mind, a seed of understanding was planted, so that a couple of years later, when I began to slowly put together the mechanics of lovemaking, that clip would spring forth, and I’d get it.
Harry also taught me that I could overlook a lot of things if a guy was funny. How else to explain that I fantasized about kissing him, a (fictional) man who wore a mock turtleneck, cable-knit fisherman sweater and went speed walking in running tights on legs that I could snap like candy canes? Other than one brief, titillating afternoon where, standing in the Sharper Image, he wore a blue-and-green, checked button-down with the sleeves rolled up over his forearms, his general appearance didn’t do it for me. The funny did. Specifically, the kind of funny that had him look like a fool, all in the service of making Sally laugh. Talking in funny voices in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Singing into her answering machine. Harry was kind of a blowhard at the beginning of the movie, but life humbles him, and he ends up willing to be ridiculous to win her over. His devotion to correct grammar helped a little. (“With whom? With whom did you have this great sex?”)
To my detriment, I wasn’t watching When Harry Met Sally frequently from 1995 to 2000, which included all of college and a year after, years when it would have been helpful for my imaginary Jewish boyfriend to remind me of the thesis statement of the movie: men and women can’t be friends. The second half of that statement is: because the sex part always gets in the way. In my universe, of course, there was no sex part. There was the part where I wept at night and wrote in my journal, plotting romantic futures with a bunch of guys who thought we were friends. We weren’t friends. Men and women can’t be friends. The weeping and fantasizing and journal lunacy always get in the way.
One man had me hooked for almost seven years. Seven years of long, late-night phone calls, visits with my family, road trips, emotional emails. I was so sure he was eventually going to return my affections that, almost two years (two years!) into dating Michael, my future husband, I used the excuse of attending a friend’s wedding in this man’s town to visit him and confront him about why he never made a move. “I thought it would ruin our friendship,” he said. And finally, the Holy Spirit or the Great Gefilte Fish in the Sky or something woke me up. We didn’t have a friendship. I had an insecure older man I worshiped, and he had a smart, fun-loving superfan to whom he wasn’t attracted to feed his ego until he found something better. I drove back to New York, more convinced than ever that I had the world’s most perfect boyfriend, a boyfriend who graciously didn’t hold it against me that I left him for the weekend to see about another man. (A few years later, we went to that man’s wedding together, and I sobbed openly throughout the reception. Why? Who knows? Seven years is a lot to unknot. Michael still married me. I’m as astonished as you are.)
Who’s to say what valuable character traits were forged in those years of unrequited pining. It’s just, I have to believe that if only I’d listened to the skinny, mock turtleneck–wearing Jew in my head, I’d have never been in that mess in the first place.
ELEVEN
SONGS OF DELIVERANCE
WHEN I GET TO HEAVEN, RIGHT after I take inventory of which Jewish relatives were saved by the Do-Over and confirm I never again have to wear a bra, praise Jesus, I’m going to have a talk with God about bedtime.
“Hi. I’m so glad to be here,” I imagine I’ll say. “And, granted, this feels a little insignificant now, given our surroundings, and I hate to harp on something that happened on earth, since there’s a no-sadness and probably a no-holding-grudges policy here,” I’ll continue. “But I really need to understand why kids are so hard to put to bed.”
At this point, I don’t know. Does God embrace me into a warm, cedar-scented cloud, and I understand, without a word being uttered, the purpose of all human suffering? Does he show me an ancient text that reveals the one small step that parents throughout all of history have overlooked, the key to making kids fall asleep easily and stay in their beds all night? Is Sandra Boynton there?
I can sense it’s going to be big news. Should I get there before you and can somehow send word dow
n, I will. Until then, unfortunately, I’m going to have to suck it up. You are too. Because unless you are one of the two people who tell me their children drift off with nothing more than a kiss on the forehead—and I firmly believe those two people are liars—then you know what it’s like to cry helplessly on the floor of a hallway while one of your kids says yes, yes, he’ll definitely fall asleep if you just stick your pinky finger under the door and let him hold it while you both softly sing the chorus of “Firework” by Katy Perry.
. . .
Back when magazines were still flush with advertisements and money, Real Simple, where I freelanced most often, put out special issues throughout the year—bonus, themed editions separate from their normal monthly issues. There was Real Simple Travel and Real Simple Food, but the special issue that got the most traction and installments was Real Simple Family, where we devoted a hundred or so pages in each one to parenting solutions and sippy cup test-drives. One story I remember specifically was a compilation of tips from experts who had all been asked a version of the same question: “If you could give one piece of advice to parents, what would it be?” Reading specialists offered tips on raising bookworms. Child psychologists said we shouldn’t stress out about milestones or potty training. A middle-school teacher said something I’ve never forgotten, which was to “eat the frog” when it came to homework, meaning you should always encourage your child to tackle the hardest thing first. It is truly excellent advice that applies to much of adult life. But the subject that came up the most was sleep. One therapist said, “If you read one book, make it a sleep book, and do it before the baby is born, because afterwards, you’ll be too tired.” A pediatrician gave us four or five juicy quotes, and every single one was about sleep training. These sources spoke with the urgency of people who had just tunneled out of prison and were now explaining to the guy behind them the best way to carve at plaster walls with a dull spoon. At the time, I was married but had no children. It seemed a little strange to me that everyone was talking about sleep, but what did I know?
When I was little, bedtime unleashed a whole host of lunatic tendencies in me. I’ve heard that elderly men and women with dementia or Alzheimer’s experience something called sundowners, where they act a little bizarre around the time the sun sets. (According to my aunt Patti, who witnessed it, my maternal grandmother, Nana—who had dementia—once lowered herself to a mattress on the floor and then stood straight up from a squatting position, even though during the day, she was too frail to get up from a chair on her own.) That’s sort of what happened to me as a kid; every menacing thought that I’d beat back during the day would leap front and center at bedtime, and I’d do or say anything to avoid going to sleep in my own bed. One of my parents would have to lie with me, and I would put the tip of one of my fingers on one of their arms or the top of my big toe on a calf, just barely enough contact to know if they tried to slip out of my bed before I was asleep. “I’m not asleep yet!” I’d scream, if I felt their forearm move a millimeter away from my fingertip. If I woke up in the middle of the night, I’d sprint—sprint—down the stairs and the back hallway of our house and climb into their bed, my heart beating so hard that I could feel the springs in the mattress vibrate underneath me. More often I just slept with my sister, my patient and long-suffering sister, in the full-size bed in her room. When she had a sleepover—this is how nuts I was—she and her friends would sometimes sleep in my room, because I had a queen-size bed, and I was so desperate to be in the same room that I would fold myself into my baby crib, which was still in a corner of my room serving as stuffed-animal storage. I was probably six or seven at the time. I was scared of things that made no sense: volcanoes (I insisted that they could spontaneously erupt under Memphis, even though my parents tried to explain that volcanoes only erupt where there is already an existing volcano), Spiderman (don’t ask), and Nazis. The Nazi thing started after an ill-advised viewing of the movie Red Dawn with my dad, who let me watch a lot of scary movies with him when my mom wasn’t paying attention. In hindsight, this might have been part of the problem. The World War III plotline of Red Dawn got mashed up in my head with Anne Frank, and I became convinced that, in the event of a World War III, my sister and I would be taken to a concentration camp with our dad, because he was Jewish, but that our mom would be free, presumably living in Bermuda without a care in the world. The only thing that helped me go to sleep was my mother sitting by my bed, stroking my arm, and promising me over and over that if World War III broke out, she would go to the concentration camp with us. I’m telling you, it was bats in the belfry.
. . .
The first Bible verse I ever memorized was Psalm 32:7: “You are my hiding place. You preserve me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.” I’m sure my mother thought this would bring me comfort at night and release her from lying in bed with me. Sometimes, it did. I’d imagine angels perched at the four corners of my bed, like glowing sentries, or else an enormous hand of God, like the hand of the BFG in my illustrated copy, which would curl around me and shut out the world. Then I would get out of my bed, lift the blue-and-white flowered dust ruffle to peek under the bed, just to make sure there wasn’t a murderer hiding there, hop back up, lie down, pull my hair over my exposed ear,* and eventually fall asleep. To this day, if Michael is out of town, I sleep with the television on all night long. It has to be a news channel; otherwise, I might wake up to a B-rate horror movie on TBS at 3:00 a.m.
Given my own atrocious ability to fall asleep as a child, you’d think I would have empathy for my children’s struggles. Nope. It doesn’t seem fair, I realize, but it’s as if, now that I am forty-three years old and the adult in the room, a switch has flipped. The blinders are off. I can see the irrational fears as nonsense, and I can’t abide the nonsense, because I need everyone to go to sleep as soon as humanly possible.
I should show solidarity. You have an all-night-C-SPAN habit, I tell myself. You’re no different from them. I should try to channel my mother, who selflessly endured countless conversations about magma and Hitler. I should read my children scripture that would help them rest in the giant palm of the BFG. I should do a lot of things. But none of it comes naturally to me.
The time of day is the biggest hurdle. Not to suggest that my children are calm and cooperative at all other hours of the day—far from it—but why does their need become greatest at night, when I am holding it together with the strength of a newborn kitten? All day long there are drip, drip, drips into my emotional bucket. Arguments about clothes or breakfast in the morning, fights with siblings on the walk home from school, a thousand tiny questions while I’m trying to cook dinner or go to the bathroom in peace, fill the bucket. By the time we get to 7:00 p.m., the bucket is full. One more pushback, one more plea for something I’ve already said no to, and that’s it. Everything is going to overflow. I hear friends say that bedtime is just the sweetest time, and I want to barf. “Putting my kids to bed, we have the most precious conversations about their days. It’s when the best stuff comes out!” they’ll say. Is the best stuff barf? Because, barf. I heard a very wise Bible teacher, Paul David Tripp, once say that we as parents are the hands and feet of Jesus for our children on earth. When they are playing instead of going to sleep or whining instead of settling down, we can storm back in anger, he said, or we can be the hands and feet of Jesus. We can show mercy and gentle correction and safety and love.
I don’t need to tell you that I’m not the hands and feet of Jesus at bedtime—the witch from Tangled, maybe.
If you want to know the truth, I’m not showing much mercy and love to my children because I’d rather show it to my husband: he who makes me a Manhattan at 7:30 p.m. instead of deciding that’s the ideal time to ask me if I could please put twenty-four sponge rollers into his hair so he can have curls the next day for school. I am intensely selfish with him. When my kids take more than their fair share of my day, encroaching on the alone time with Michael that I feel entitled to, I g
et antsy. It’s like I’m trying to hurry a cake to bake. Go to sleep, go to sleep, leave me alone, stop asking me things, hurry up, hurry up—and then I’m overly indignant when it all falls apart. I can’t say what the best solution is here; it’s important to have kid-free time in the evenings. But there are seasons, and feeling entitled to kid-free time isn’t productive. From experience, I can tell you that saying, “I love Daddy more than you, and you’re cutting into my time with him” to your seven-year-old isn’t either.
Have I prayed with my children, you might ask? Have I prayed for them? For restful minds and bodies? For deliverance from evil and volcanoes? Yes, I have. And still, here are some highlights of our sleep drama over the past ten years:
Julia would not take a pacifier as a baby and would only fall asleep with one of our pinky fingers in her mouth.
From the age of two until seven, Julia would not fall asleep unless an adult was in her room. We’ve sat at the foot of the bed, on the floor next to the bed, and in the hallway just outside her room. Michael and I have lost days of our lives waiting to crawl on our bellies, like Navy Seals in a swamp, out of her room without her noticing. We’ve broken down. (I’ve broken down.) We’ve said, “You are ruining my life.” (Again, me.) We’ve given her melatonin. We’ve given her another melatonin. When James was two and a half, we let him start sleeping with her, which helped a little.
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