2:71 a.m.

The Surreal Guide to Parenting – Chapter 4: The Impossible Hours

When attempting to put an infant down for sleep in the early morning hours, it is recommended, though within the caregiver’s discretion, to go just a little insane.

Not all the way insane, of course. You are still a parent with responsibilities. But micro-doses of insanity can do wonders when faced with a situation outside the realms of reason.

Because you will already be well past the point of a logical solution. If the stages of grief were applicable to this battle between yourself and a barely conscious child, you will find yourself somewhere nestled between bargaining and despair, a no-man ’s-land where you will try to convince yourself that your actions can have any impact on getting this kid to sleep.

You will have already tried all your tricks. The Itsy-Bitsy Spider didn’t seem to have the same soothing power it did the night before. Gently bouncing in a semi-circular motion worked wonders last week, but today (this morning?) seem to do nothing but aggravate this bundle of joy you are holding. And don’t even THINK about trying to give them their favourite pacifier. How dare you? The indignity! Your child’s screams of protest declare as you will try to gently place a soother in their mouth.

So instead, whether consciously or not, you will wrestle with the definition of insanity you had once heard – doing the same thing over and over and hoping for different results. Does that apply to your current situation? You’ll pause, as if you feel like you had already asked yourself this question earlier in the evening, but your momentary ceasing of rocking the baby leads to an immediate eruption of cries and squeals, so you will push the thought back out of your mind and continue your motions.

And in between the continuous rocking and trying to gently wrestle a baby so that they remain still in your lap, you will shift your gaze up to the dim electric clock sitting across the room on the dresser.

2:71 a.m.

You KNOW that can’t be right. You’ll blink and try and refocus your eyes, your glasses sitting comfortably on the bedside table in your own bedroom, doing nothing to help you in your current situation. The number will blur, no clearer than they were before, but still sitting with an odd sense that you are in a time you haven’t been before.

You’ll try and think back to how long you’ve been in the room this evening. You will remember looking at the clock at 1:30, but you thought that was only 70 renditions of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star ago. No, wait, you’ll think. Wasn’t Twinkle Twinkle Little Star last night’s song? Weren’t you singing Bah Bah Black Sheep tonight? Or was it the Alphabet song? The fact that each one of these has the exact same tune as the other won’t help give any concrete form to your thoughts, and you’ll stare back at the clock.

2:71 a.m.

Surely it had been a minute since you had last looked at the clock, right? Even in this broken time you will find yourself in, you are definitely still advancing forward, right? You will look down at your baby, no closer to sleep than they were 15 minutes ago, and you’ll try to brush off the thought that you’re actually making the opposite of progress.

So, what is a parent to do when you find yourself in this space where hours and minutes no longer follow the rules? When the combination of sleep deprivation, late nights, early mornings, and constant vigilance to keep a child happy and healthy seem to bend the very fabric of time?

You savour it.

Throughout your life, whoever may be reading this, the world is going to take more time than it has earned.

The moments when you are on your couch, looking at your phone, 30 minutes passing without you even recognizing it. 50 minutes spent in traffic, your mind long since numb to trying to entertain itself as you idle, instead almost gladly allowing the time to slip past you. Lying in bed, unable to sleep, realizing you’ve been staring at the ceiling for an hour, unable to recall what you were occupying your mind with. There are countless ways that time, the one resource you could have sworn was finite, will elude you without you even realizing it.

So how lucky are you to have found yourself in one of the few opportunities where the world has given time back to you?

A moment seemingly outside of hours, spent between an exhausted parent and a child new to all experiences. A moment that in the present screams of frustration but will be looked back warmly as the years go on. A moment as fleeting as it is infinite.

Now, is the perceived time on the clock literal? Will you actually managed to have slipped into a space outside of minutes and seconds as you try and get your child to sleep? Who’s to say? All this book can tell you is your baby WILL eventually be asleep, and every minute of effort you put into that endeavor is one minute closer to success. So, take solace in the fact that this moment will pass, and you yourself will eventually be in bed as well.

But our warning to you: do not find yourself addicted to wishing these moments to end, of counting down the minutes until you can resume whatever task you had planned for yourself.

Because these moments will end. Time will resume its march forward, and time will always win. So welcome every 2:71 a.m. and other impossible times you discover. Moments only unlocked by looking forward to them being finished. Appreciate every additional non-second you manage to extract from the world. A small victory over entropy, delivered to you graciously by a screaming, writhing child.

Oh, and try a white noise machine. We’ve heard that works wonders.