Their son had been a terrible sleeper. This was known in the way family legends are known — not as a complaint anymore, but as mythology, the founding story of their early years of parenting.
For eighteen months he’d woken two or three times a night, and they’d divided the nights with the grim practicality of people who understood that survival required systems.
Odd nights were hers. Even nights were his.
What she hadn’t expected — what she’d never forgotten, even now that their son slept through reliably and the whole exhausted era had receded into the past — was what the even nights had felt like.
Not her nights. His nights. The ones she was theoretically sleeping through.
She’d never told him she was only asleep half the time. That she’d hear him get up and lie there in the dark, tracking the sounds — the creak of the floorboard, the low murmur of his voice, the specific quality of quiet that meant the baby had settled. She’d heard him sing, occasionally, not knowing she could hear. Old songs, slightly off-key, entirely unselfconscious.
She’d fallen in love with him differently in those months. Not in spite of the exhaustion but through it. Through the evidence of who he was when no one was watching: patient, gentle, singing badly to a small person in the dark.
“I used to hear you on your nights,” she told him, years later, their son now eight and sleeping twelve hours without question.
Luca looked at her. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I was and I wasn’t.” She paused. “You sang.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Badly.”
“Very badly,” she agreed. “I loved it.”
✦ Today’s Reflection
Have you ever witnessed your partner being their best self when they didn’t know you were watching? What did you see?
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