The Death of Naptime: Competing Models

A month or so ago, Junior's naptime died.

It has been replaced by daddy's naptime. I don't call it "daddy's naptime," and it only lasts thirty minutes on the outside, but it is still a nap, it is me who is taking it, so this represents a sort of revolution. For Junior, the new regime is called "quiet time." It may one day provide Junior with his first retrospective inkling of his father's gradual descent into dotage. What quiet time means, from Junior's point of view, is that there is a temporal zone in the early afternoon when, for the sake of daddy's nap, or for the sake of daddy's sanity, life deliberately slows down, and pandemonium is prohibited. Things that make noise are discouraged, excessive motion is frowned upon, and an atmosphere of meditative silence, if not overall sleepiness, is cultivated.

There are days when Junior, perhaps nostalgic for the fading Golden Age of his toddler-dom, does indeed crash as he used to, which is to say with bravado and wherever he happens to find himself. But more often, he complies with the new regime and its exhortations to quietness rather than somnolence. He draws in his coloring books, erects fantastic structures with blocks and train tracks, or arranges all the objects of his life into mysterious Joseph Cornell-type compartments. It is during quiet time that Junior assembles his collection of tiny plastic beads, which no one remembers acquiring and which have since been eaten by the dog, into the shovel of his plastic bulldozer, or the tilting container of his toy boxcar.

I will find that our horde of buckeyes, harvested last September and stored in a dedicated bowl of natural curiosities, has now been dispersed among the bookshelves of our home, positioned to the left in each case, perhaps a marker indicating how one should scan the titles on each shelf from left to right, or perhaps placed there according to some inscrutable principle of feng shui. Coming upon Junior during his quiet time activity is like stumbling upon a lone prairie dog, a sentinel: he pops up as from out of a hole, his long torso still and fully extended, sniffing the air for my intentions and scanning my body for the slightest movement. Is quiet time over? What is the afternoon fate of our domestic ecosystem? If I continue on my way with wooden face and no eye contact, he drops back into his burrow and returns to his Joseph Cornell projects. If I show the slightest sign of empathy or affection, then the spell of quiet time is irremediably broken, and our noisy, kinetic life resumes.

Modeling the Nap Function
x = time, y = need for nap
A = Daddy, B= Junior
q area = daddy's productivity
r area = daddy's dotage
s = nap equilibrium

What I haven't yet explained is why the death of Junior's naptime coincided so neatly with the birth of my own. Neutral observers might reasonably infer the presence of some kind of causal relationship, and indeed, they would probably be right. But a causal relationship of what kind? There are two competing models used to explain the data plotted on the graph above. Fortunately, I am confident in dismissing the most obvious explanation, that of the Dotage Theory. The Dotage Theory posits an inverse relationship between Junior's mounting stamina and my own declining energy level. It is a conceptually simple, intuitively appealing, and straightforward explanation for daddy and junior's changing nap needs.

Plotted on Cartesian coordinates we see -- in greatly simplified outline, of course -- how daddy's need for a nap presents the concave up-sweeping parabola A. Over time, daddy's nap need is increasing, though it is not clear how this curve may taper off or plateau. Conversely, Junior's decreasing nap need plots the concave down-sweeping parabola B. At t = 0 (the year 2007) the point in time when these curves were farthest apart, the area q (or daddy's productivity) was at its greatest extent; it has steadily decreased since then, passing through a point of nap parity s, and has now entered a stage described by area r, which may be understood as an overall daddy productivity deficit.

I contend that the Dotage Theory, though perhaps valid when extended into the later decades of adult life, does not adequately capture the complexity of the system in which I find myself. My new naptime habit, I argue, is a result of the displacement of a portion of my daily sleep requirement from evening to afternoon. According to this more sophisticated Sleep Displacement Theory, my total sleep need has remained constant; what has changed is the scheduling of that portion of the day during which I harvest a certain portion of sleep, together with undisturbed Me Time.

In this view, the reason daddy now needs these afternoon naps is that he is staying up later. Now that Junior no longer naps as long as he once did -- for one, two, or even three hours in the afternoon -- late evenings are the only time daddy can carve out some solitude, find a little peace of mind, or a moment in which to read a book. Glorious, egotistical, voluptuous satisfaction of daddy's greatest middle-aged desire: not to have sex, but to read a book. And so it is: next morn, like an adolescent lover, I am groggy and grumpy, punching in at my job and giving it my caffeine-fueled best for the next 8 hours, until I can return to whatever it was I had been reading before I fell asleep the previous night.

But, long before a verdict is returned from the tribunes of science, and usually at around 2PM, despite all self-stimulating efforts to the contrary, I am hit by a collapsing wall of fatigue. I can see it coming from far off, an oncoming wave moving in from the horizon. It is usually clear that there is no escape, that there is no safe or higher ground. I simply have to ride it out, which I do. On the couch.

3.75

At 3.75, there is a certain way of running on the cratered surface of playground wood chips, with arms bent at the elbows like the upper limbs of a marsupial, tucked in and irrelevant. There is the forward motion -- toddling -- generated by legs swinging without hips to smooth them out, the torso upright and isolated from the movements of the lower half, so unlike the athletic movements of a 6 year old. At 3.75 persist the red apple spots on the cheeks of a boy that are the envy of passing women.

At 3.75, we are bent over, he more comfortably than I, examining what flora can survive the Park District's weekly motorized guillotine: thick blades of something resembling lawn grass, and the flowers of a common clover plant; bottle caps burrowing their way to archaeological posterity, and the locust seedpods that he collects into bundles because they rattle like plastic toys. At 3.75, I show him freshly shucked buckeyes, and he is not moved. Not much later I circle round a tree, harvesting cicada shells, which he drops from his hand as soon as I place them there.

When my son turns 3.75, as his father turns 41.5, our individual chronometers briefly stop, marking an absolute moment in time with two particular values. At that moment, in an empty playground between Lake Shore Drive on one side and a late-season pickup game on the other, we are visited by the daddy dialectic.

The dialectic is better known for its role in cosmic things, revealing its staging of history's greatest events in small and offhand ways, as when Alfred Hitchcock appears in a film of his own direction. For those who happen to be listening, perhaps writing a thesis in philosophy a few floors above, the morning echo of hooves through the streets of a German town, trailing behind the horse that carries Napoleon, announces that the world has changed forever.

The daddy dialectic produces revolutions of a smaller scale. When it visits us several weeks after the cicadas fall silent, it is not the insects but my son who has molted. I can see his transparent shell. It is in the baby swing, with the little rubber baskets for four-legged children. "Daddy, those swings are for babies," he tells me from the big-kids swing a few yards away. Then, realizing that he is now a creature with a past, no longer living in a uniform, timeless present: "I used to be a baby. Do you remember when I was a baby? Were you a baby, too, daddy?"

Yes, you used to be a baby, it was just yesterday and I remember it well. And of course, I used to be a baby too. But I don't remember that.

And so departed the daddy dialectic into the autumn afternoon. In my hands it deposited the worldly recollections of my son's first 3.75 years of life, like the molted cicada shells I had handed to him in August. I hold these moltings as if I had lived in them myself. But to him, they are the only signs of a first experience that will always be alien, reflected back to him by the others and objects he touched but does not remember: family albums, cell cam pics posted to Facebook, preschool artwork, stories we make a point to tell him or the ones we manage, haphazardly, to remember. What is clear and distinct to me in the run of those 3.75 years will be the hazy, enchanted, mythological prelude to his later life.

Of course I, who am interested enough in his childhood that for three years I have written about it on this blog, remember virtually none of my own. Sometimes, in the hallway at preschool, or on ever rarer occasions when I am alone in a cafe, I hear mothers trading stories about the wild animals trapped in their slings, the untrained or tranquilized primates that challenge and bewilder them, as if they had never been such very small children themselves. To hear and join in their chatter, the experience of an other's earliest youth unfolds as fresh and as rough as accounts of the first voyages of discovery, when continents and oceans were opened to Christopher Columbus and Vasco de Gama.

But the freshness of early childhood and voyages of discovery are only possible after a tremendous forgetting. What Columbus found had been there for some time, and others had come across it well before him. In laughing with and being charmed by small children, I am laughing with and being charmed by what I imagine I used to be, seizing on their image in order to resurrect vestiges of the toddler's neural architecture preserved within the later formations of my cerebrum. I hold in trust the memories of my son's first years, and he restores me to a semblance of my earliest self.

At 3.75, the days of October string out before us like a gallery of paper lanterns twirling slowly on a sagging rope. They filter dry light through draperies of cellulose, to enclose the world in glowing boxes or orange, red, and gold. At the end of this collapsing gallery that arches above our sidewalk waits November and, not far beyond, birthday number 4. For the first time, he knows his birthday is approaching. And he knows that it will be followed by another one with yet another number, the way he now knows that fall is a season that is followed by winter, the way he used to be a baby, and now is not.

One Dad's View on the Benefits of Staying Home

I liked this list, from the blog "Here Goes Everything," which I just added to our blog roll. This sounds like a guy who has taken some hits in his life, but is making the best of it and using his experiences to continue growing.

Words: Learning Them and Losing Them

There are essentially two piles of books in our household: Spot's pile and my pile. My wife reads mostly magazines and trade journals, and listens to e-books on the daily commute. I try to read books during Spot's naps, but fear this habit may be facing extinction, which is a source of great stress to me.

So there are basically two piles of books, with smaller offshoot-piles developing in various rooms at any given moment, in addition to the reservoir of those that manage to stay in their assigned place on their assigned bookshelf. Spot's is the more motley pile, with books of all shapes, sizes, and textures -- rubber books, cardboard books, books that float, books with sandpaper and gauzy and scratch-and-sniff patches. At the top of his stack recently have been such titles as Boo-Hoo Baby, Goodnight Gorilla, and Pat the Bunny. In a separate, smaller pile is Llama Llama Mad at Mama, and somewhere under the crib is Bee-bim Bop!

Dad's pile is enough to scare any young mind away from the very prospect of literacy. It is certainly more massive, contains far fewer illustrations, and none of it floats. The royalties from the whole lot of my pile probably don't amount to a single check to the deserving author of Goodnight Gorilla, and in some municipalities might be considered a fire hazard.

Both piles are growing. What is disconcerting about my pile is that it contains a growing number of 600 page tomes that have yet to be opened, with titles like Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy; Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life, and Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution.

A very amateur psychoanalyst friend had no trouble diagnosing me with the bookish version of obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is the intellectual version of eating flies or walking backwards to the bus stop. Or a frustrated academic's version of grandma's cat hoarding. It's not rational. There's simply no way, given my current lifestyle, that I could possibly read these books at the rate that I am acquiring them. My desires are outstripping my abilities.

Meanwhile, Spot is making good use of everything he's got; in fact, it doesn't seem to be quite enough. In addition to chewing on his own books, and whipping the pages back and forth with demonic fervor, he occasionally strays into my pile, seems drawn to the Marxism shelf, and loves Gordon Craig's classic monograph on modern Germany because it falls off the shelf with such a massive, massive thud.

Like most children, Spot seems to want to read Chinese, or perhaps Hebrew; which is to say, upside down and backwards. This versatility will be quickly eliminated; what really counts is that he's figured out how to turn pages, and the mastery of this simple technology is really the key to the universe. He's soaking things up like a sponge, and although none of his frothy diphthongs or happy glottal clicks will find a place in modern English, the link between page, sign, sound (or mysteriously funny joke) is clearly there for him.

It's astounding to watch this act of coordination, and I try to focus on his progress in compensation for my own sense of steadily diminishing IQ, and the nagging sense that everything in my brain has been steam-pressed in the industrial diaper laundromat of fatherhood. Perhaps that accounts for the recent surge in tomes: if it can't be held in my brain, then maybe I can trap it in a book, and hold it down for a while. Until I can get it back.

On bad days all this business with words can seem like a purely Darwinian transfer of resources, from my brain to his: "Son, here is my vocabulary. Enjoy it. I won't be needing it anymore."

On good days, when we achieve something like family bliss, Spot sits in one place on the rug and quietly flips back and forth through all 700 pages of The Search for Modern China. The dog slumbers in a sunbeam, and I sit back in the armchair, feel my years, and reread the five pages I read the day before and have since forgotten.