Lullabye

When the Bug was very tiny, I started to sing to him. He was only a couple weeks old. I’d always wanted to sing to my children, but suddenly I felt very strange and self-conscious. I would have been much more comfortable standing alone in front of a crowd, as weird as that sounds.

Plus, with all my post-partum hormones, it was difficult for me to make it through a verse of anything without getting all teary-eyed and quivery.

But I kept with it.

When the Bug was about 3 months old, the songs were a way of keeping myself sane. Every nap involved over a half hour of pacing across the room and I sang to pass the time.

Still, the Bug never seemed too attached to my singing. He humored me during diaper changes when I busted out baby versions of Lady Gaga. (Baby-razzi, Baby Face, Baby Romance, etc.) But he didn’t want to be held and cuddled and sung to. He didn’t like it when I sang with the radio. He didn’t like the radio, period.

So the singing stopped. And I was always sad about it.

Once we had Graham’s diagnosis it made a little more sense. His dislike of music was nothing personal, it was just part of his own little detachment from my world.

But all that changed in the last month.

Graham started to get fussy when put down for bed. He’s normally angelic and perfectly compliant about it. We didn’t do anything drastic, but we started sitting with him for a couple of minutes so he could lay in bed and relax.

After a few days of this I started rubbing his head or his back. Sometimes he would refuse, but sometimes he’d be okay.

Soon it turned into a ritual, and a ritual is the key to life with the Bug.

After we’ve turned off the lights and turned on his ocean sounds, he gets in his bed and curls up with his blanket. I say, “Do you want me to sit with you?” He says, “Yeah.”

I say, “Do you want me to rub your back?”  He says, “Yeah.”

And after a few weeks of this I got gutsy. I said, “Do you want me to sing?” He didn’t say anything, probably because he had no clue what I meant. So I started singing. I sang Sweet Baby James, the same song I sang to him that first time when he was so small and I could barely get through it. And he let me.

So I started asking every time. And now he says, “Yeah.”

I love it. Because he could easily say no. He knows what I’m asking. But he says yes.

Lately I have shifted from Sweet Baby James to Don’t Worry, Baby because I’m weird and sing oldies to my kid. I think I may stick with it for a while, though I sometimes wonder if I should make my own alternate lyrics for the verse about the car race, which also happens to be the verse that says, “Oh what she does to me, when she makes love to me.” Or maybe not, I’ve known that song my whole life and I didn’t realize any of that was there until I was well into my 20′s.

But for now, we are happy. And I’m looking forward to singing to Tessa, too.

Related Posts:

• Preschool PreFreakout
• So Long, 2011
• Some Heavenly Peace