full circle

The past few nights, after we put Damian to bed and say our ritualized goodnights, he lies there for ten or so minutes and then we hear the floor creak and the sound of breathing. "Damian, are you up?" Silence. The floor creaks again. "Damian, go back to bed!" And he does.

Tonight I was sitting in bed, my legs warm under the comforter, typing away on my computer. Dan was downstairs doing preparatory work for his new gig. The floor creaked.

"Damian, are you up?"

Silence.

"Is everything okay?"

"Yes."

But still he remained in the center room between our two bedrooms. "Do you have to go to the bathroom?"

"No."

"What's going on?"

"Nothing." He began to head back to his bedroom, I could tell by the direction of the creaking floorboards.

But I asked him to come into my room. Motioned him to sit on the bed beside me. He slipped his legs under the covers. I asked him what was going on, why he got out of bed every night.

"It's too hard to explain."

I encouraged him to try anyway. It took an awful lot of coaxing while he sat beside me, looking intently at the cougar on his pajama top and picking at the lint on his pant leg, but he finally did tell me what he was thinking about tonight at the moment when he felt compelled to rise from his bed and make his creaking way toward the glow of my room.

Turns out he'd been thinking about the movie Gremlins, which we watched Sunday night. Dan had TiVO'd it, remembering the silly slapstick bits where the gremlins are watching Snow White or singing faux Christmas carols or being exploded in a microwave oven. And Damian weathered the emotional rollercoaster of Finding Nemo unfazed, plus at least one or two Disney movies with scary bits, surely this wouldn't be a problem.

Apparently it was. Damian told me he was remembering the part of the movie where the Mogwai mutate into gremlins inside scary-ass huge cocoons. He wanted to know how to stop being scared. I told him all about how the movie was made, that the gremlins were stop-motion puppets (okay, I don't know for sure that they were, but it sounded good and I knew I could explain it).

His clenched hands relaxed, but he still looked tense. I told him about how I saw the Beatles animated movie, Yellow Submarine, when I was little, and how I was so scared of the Blue Meanies, I thought about them every night for weeks. I lied and said that my parents explained about how movies weren't real and how the Meanies were just drawings and that I felt safe after that. (Is it immoral to lie to your child about your past to help him over an emotional hump?)

That worked. He seemed relieved. If I'd gotten through it, he could too, I guess. I told him he shouldn't hesitate next time, that if he was feeling scared about something, he should come talk to me. I told him it's part of my job as a mother. He said he didn't know that. We said goodnight one more time.

But he stopped as he got to my doorway, and turned back to me. "Instead of thinking about the scary parts of the movie, I'll think about the funny parts." And then he said a final goodnight and padded off to his own room.