After months of very little repose, my wife and I grew irritable, barking at each other about everything from whose turn it was to sing, “I See the Moon” to our daughter at 3am to who – in our sleepwalking states, had placed the baby monitor in the fridge next to the long-forgotten bottle of white wine. We bought a crib from a couple we knew and tried to relocate our daughter from our bed into the new digs, but as soon as she saw her new gated community of one, she wailed like a banshee. Since my wife and I were both sleepy and cowardly, we moved her back in with us.
“Mamaaaaa,” our daughter yelled. We crouched down even lower, as if she had one of those thermal-imaging machines the cops use to see through the walls of homes rented by violent felons. She abandoned what little speech she possessed and regressed to primal screams and cries, the kind we hadn’t heard for months. Below the wails, we listened to her rattle the bars of her wooden cage. My wife, eyes closed, whispered softly to herself. Even though she was raised Catholic among Mormons in Utah, my wife is usually not someone who speaks freely to the Lord.
“Should I pray, too?” I asked her in what I believed what a spousal bonding moment.
She opened her eyes. “Pray? I’m swearing, you idiot,” she said, and I could recognize the mother tongue clearly now.
