|
Alex used to sleep through the night. Ten, 11 hours, that boy down there,
soft and calm, a painting, lips gently parted. Maybe he'd be restless if sick,
but otherwise 10, 11 hours like a little log, allowing his parents plenty of
time for an evening. That was the sweet age.
Now, even getting him to sleep is a challenge. Every night, it seems, every
night. He kicks the wall for 10 minutes, then pitches side to side fast enough
to make him dizzy, except it seems to just make him giggle harder and harder as
the hands on the big clock over in the corner of their room creep past 9:15,
9:20, 9:25. I can envision Alex groggy over Elmo next morning, waiting for the
school bus and the sunrise with rump high and head buried in the couch cushions.
I can see the note home from school the next evening: "Alex hard a hard time
settling down today..." Or worse, I will arrive at work - Jesus, how are you
supposed to work when your 7-year-old is spinning like Linda Blair at almost 10
p.m.? - and find the red message light on, call Jill, and learn he'd puked on
the bus on the way to school and Jill had to go get him. Lately too he's been
falling asleep on the school bus home.
He bounces and bounces, pulling out his sheet and slamming his feet onto the
wall. I grab him. "Stop it!" I shout. Ned looks on. Jill looks on. When I
see Alex like this, it looks like every nightmare of a bad adulthood for Alex
I've ever had, like every bad end I've envisioned for my own life.
"Jeff," says Jill, "take him into the bathroom and leave the light off."
That is new. I take a deep breath and take him by the hand - trying to not
yank - and we head to the bathroom. I take him in and shut the door, bracing my
foot against it so he can't open it. I shut the light off. He reaches up to turn
it on. "No, Alex," I tell him. "We're leaving it off."
We give it a few minutes. I hold his hand and try to hug him so he won't
careen into the bathtub and give this night a whole new dimension of Problem,
but he goes stiff and arches his back against me. He doesn't want to be held. I
keep a grip on his hand. We give it a few more minutes. Then I take him back to
his bed. He seems calmer.
Alex goes still for a minute - out of the corner of my eye I see Ned quiet on
Jill's lap, where she's trying to read to him, and I wonder in quick fear what
in hell he'll make of all this some day - and as Alex revs up again I grab one
of the scented candles we keep in the closet for evenings such as this, that are
dribbling away. Alex smells it (cinnamon, I think) and holds it out to Jill.
"Smell," he says, "smell." Then he throws it across the room.
"All right," I say to Jill. "Get the medicine."
"Medicine!?" says Ned, suddenly no mere accident witness. "Is Alex getting
medicine!?" Ned adores medicine.
It isn't medicine. It's melatonin. "It won't hurt him," his pediatrician
says. Jill's cousins, who also have an autistic son, swear by it.
"Melatonin is the all-natural nightcap," reads the opening paragraph at
www.melatonin.com. It's secreted by the pineal gland, a pea-size structure at
the center of the brain, as our eyes register the fall of darkness. At night,
melatonin is produced to help our bodies regulate our sleep-wake cycles. The
amount of it produced by our body seems to lessen as we get older. Scientists
believe this may be why young people have less problem sleeping than older
people."
Not around here, buddy. We keep two little metal cups in the bathroom, with a
pulverized quarter tablet in one and a pulverized half tablet in the other, the
way warships used to keep gradated sacks of gunpowder to throw cannonballs
specific distances. "Give'im the whole three-quarters!" I tell Jill. Ned gets
nothing except a request to put his head down and go to sleep.
Usually we mix it in a teaspoon of cough syrup; thank God that over the last
half year Alex has gotten better at drinking medicine. But the stuff never
dissolves completely, and Alex usually sticks his tongue out when he hits the
grit in the bottom of the cup. Tonight, however, Jill tries something else new:
dissolving the melatonin in warm water.
I'm not wild about this. I still call it "medicine," and even "a drug." About
as accurate as I can be on this much sleep. But take it from somebody who's been
hooked on his own sleeping pills, and who only lately kicked nasal spray at
bedtime: you build up a resistance to this stuff. Besides, Jill tried the big M
a few months ago, and found she couldn't stay asleep. We usually get about 90
minutes of Alex Asleep for every quarter tablet.
He drinks it. In 20 minutes, he's asleep. Ned soon follows. Then like cops
reviewing the procedure on a call, Jill and I recount this latest bedtime,
looking for improvements, praying to find the one thing that gets us back to the
golden age. Praying even that he just sleeps until 6 a.m.
He wakes up at four. The whole house wakes up with him. I yell at Jill for no
good reason. She crushes another quarter tablet.
Jeff Stimpson's articles and essays can be found on his website at jeffslife.net Jeff has also written a book entitled: Alex: The Fathering Of A Preemie.
|
