Bedtime Stories For Generation Alpha

Bedtime Stories For Generation Alpha

The room is dark. It’s my sons’ bedtime, and the younger snores peacefully while the older tosses and turns. (If you have ever slept in the same room as a snorer, you might identify here.)

From the top bunk, he gives a sigh of exasperation.

“MOM,” he does not whisper. “I CAN’T SLEEP.”

“You just have to try,” I tell him. “Let your mind slow down. Breathe deeply. Focus on relaxing your ankles … now your knees … now your thig–”

“Mom,” he hisses, “it’s not working.”

Even though literally no more than 90 seconds have passed since he alerted me to his insomnia, I tell him I get it, climb the rickety ladder to his top bunk (do not try this at home; these ladders are not meant for middle-aged parents but for their less voluminous small humans), and lie carefully down next to him.

“You know something?” I start. “Papa used to have to drive me around in the middle of the night, in his old VW, so I would go to sleep.”

“Didn’t you do that with me, too?”

“Yep,” I affirm, remembering the long expanses of dark streets lit only by small lamps on porches, the red reflections of traffic lights in glossy rain-cover on Old Hammond, the sound of the susurrus Honda engine chirruping as we waited to merge into inexplicable 2-a.m. traffic, the rhythmic ticking of the turn signal when I heard his breath slow in his car seat and aimed the car toward home. “I did. Dada, too.”

For a minute or so, the room fills with sleepy silence and I think the whisper of my memory might have worked its way into the electric network inside his brain, flicking “off” switches for synapses and gently closing the doors that offer access to new convolutions. But then, his little voice, heavier now but still very much awake, breaks the dark:

“Will you tell me stories about your childhood?”

I will. I have to decide which one. The day our family dog used the woodpile to climb onto the roof – where we found him standing stock-still like a spotted sentinel when we rounded the corner? The games my sister and I used to play in the mud? Quietly, in the voice I use for nighttime prayers, I tell him about my first memory. Walking in the shopping center parking lot, holding hands on either side with my parents, and wearing my pink puffy coat with the white snowflakes.

“It had a hood,” I tell my child, “and the hood had a ring of … not fur, but some kind of fuzzy material. I felt very glamorous in my winter coat. Like Lara from Dr. Zhivago.”

“Doctor who?” he asks, then clarifies so I will understand the true meaning of his question; “Not ‘Doctor Who’ like the David Tennant Doctor Who, but … doctor what? Dr. Gerardo?”

Smirking and glad he can’t see me, I explain that Dr. Zhivago was a Russian movie my Maman, his Grandma, loved when I was growing up; and that Julie Christie’s “Lara” was the elegant woman, the untold love-interest who always seemed to my childhood eyes to wear a heavy coat and cylindrical fur hat against the Siberian winter. “She had a special music,” I tell my child. “But that is not the point.”

“Music?” he says, then yawns.

“I’ll tell you about Lara and Dr. Zhivago another time,” I promise. “Tonight I want to tell you about my winter coat, the pink puffy coat with snowflakes, and walking in the parking lot with Grandma and Papa.

“I forget what we were doing. I hadn’t been to a movie yet at that age, and they never did evening grocery trips; so probably we had gone to The Parasol restaurant for dinner and were heading back to our car.”

“The sleepy bug?” he asks.

“Yes, baby. The same one.” And I tell him about holding one hand of each parent on either side, my little arms sticking out from my body because of the coat, and how much I loved that coat. The “fur” hood-fringe, the bright white snowflakes, and how it made me feel like I could roll down a mountainside and sustain no injuries because I was so round and bundly in it.

“And then I saw this other little girl, a little bit bigger or older than me, staring at me. She was also holding her parents’ hands, one on either side, and the three of them were walking toward the three of us.” I wonder if I can ever truly convey the feeling of that moment. The strangeness of wearing a parka in Southern California, even on a winter’s night. The way my body felt like it wasn’t exactly my own body, because of the chill in the air, because of the parka.

And because of the girl. She had a petite heart-shaped face and dark-brown ringlets, and “she was wearing the same coat. Pale pink and puffy, with pockets deep enough that a kid with mittens on could still snuggle their hands in them, and a design of pure white snowflakes.”

She looked into me and I disappeared. She was taller, curlier, and her coat had many more stars than mine. It felt like looking at myself in two places. I had to look down at my own hands to make sure they were doing what I remembered them doing, because once I’d seen her I couldn’t tell which body I was in anymore, hers or mine.

I am musing on this memory in the darkness when my ten-year-old says,

“MOM.”

Yes, sweetheart.

“That doesn’t make sense. I mean, how could you not be … you?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him in the quieting room. “I guess I didn’t know really who ‘me’ was, yet.”

He finds my hand and pats it, against the mattress of his top bunk, slipping away across the Marvel sheet. For a fleeting second The Hulk’s face looms up toward me in the dim illumination of the nightlight.

“I know that feeling, Mom,” he says. “I want you to know you’re not alone.”

He rolls onto his side away from me and I lie stunned, there in his darkness, snuggling the body of this capable, insightful, kind little person who emerged from me ten years ago and surpassed me in compassion and intelligence only months later. I used to hold him in the rocking chair after nursing him to sleep, reading on my phone about infant brain development: a newborn’s brain has some 100 billion neurons. In order to attain this average, “the brain must grow at the rate of about 250,000 nerve cells per minute … throughout the course of pregnancy.” I remember reading that the brain of a baby doubles in size during the first year of life. At birth, a baby’s brain is roughly ¼ the size of an adult’s; after one year, it has grown to 1/2 the size.

And by ten years? My child has comprehended across the vast expanses of time and space that what my 2-year-old self needed was someone to see and anchor me, to reassure me I was still there. I don’t think I even understood that myself, until he patted my hand and The Hulk smashed my kiddo’s consciousness wearily.

In the darkness I bury my face in his hair, the way I used to do when he was smaller than the length of one of my arms. Then, his hair held a sweetness kind of like beeswax and some kind of rare essential oil; I used to inhale it in gulps and try to make myself memorize it. If my husband entered the room, I would say “get over here and smell this baby!” And we would sigh together. “I could smell this – all. day,” we would tell each other.

Now, his scalp holds the salt of after-school karate practice and something he ate at lunch, and his hair is thick and slightly oily. I bury my face in it anyway. This one spot behind his ear, against the ridge of the bones of his skull, still emanates his own special smell, the fragrance of his life’s unique place in Creation. I could smell it all day, except –

“MOM,” he whispers blurrily, nearly asleep, “can you tell me another story about your childhood?”

“Tomorrow night,” I whisper back. “I’ll tell you about our insane Dalmatian.”

He chuckles slightly, then snores on his next inhale.

We lie front-to-back in the boys’ dark bedroom, where the ceiling fan can no longer stir the sleep-heavy air and the sound of slumbering breath overpowers my phone’s murmured lullaby playlist. I can hear his heart, its steady pulse like a drum in the distance. He shifts position until his hand wraps itself in mine.

Everything changes, I want to tell him, but tenderly, in a story for childhood.

One day you won’t remember the night I told you about the girl in my coat, or won’t remember why I told you the story. And that’s OK. We hold what we can hold, and loose the rest over time, and it all sifts through the veil of sky, sharp and cold and midnight-pure, or soft-damp and gold and homey, an infinity of infinitesimal crystalline structures breaking against our open palms. That pink puffy coat – was the pattern snowflakes or stars? Does it matter?

Probably not, I think. And –

Yes.

Because fifty years later you may lie in the dark with a small human whose beauty leaves you breathless, and they will return to you something you didn’t understand as lost until suddenly, there in the dark, you realize they’ve given you a gift, and you suddenly know who you are, and that you’re right where you’re meant to be, and that you always were.