Things That Go Bump In The Night

My son is now approaching 16 months of life. (The second sentence of any piece of writing is generally not a good place for an aside, but I can't resist. I can't wait for him to hit two years so I can stop referring to his age in months. People always ask, "So when are you gonna stop giving his age in months?" in a really shitty voice. And the answer is two years. Then you get into half years. He's two. Two and a half. Three. Three and a half. Then at five, it's just years. Those are the rules. Because that's kind of how development works. [Based on my observations.])

My son is now approaching 16 months of life. There are a lot of interesting things about 16 months. My son has a way now of pointing to objects or pictures and grunting. He's asking me to tell him the word for what it is. And I'll tell him.

We sit with a book that has four animals on it: one on the top of the left page, one on the bottom of the left page, one on the top right, and one bottom right.

He points and grunts.

"Goat." I say.

"Yup." He points bottom left.

"Sheep."

"Yup." Back to the goat.

"Goat." He points bottom right.

"Lamb." He points top right.

"Pig."

"Yup." Back to the goat.

"Goat."

I know absolutely nothing about childhood development. But I imagine that what's going on over the course of the five minutes where he points at four pictures 10 times is that he's trying to nail these words down.

Imagine you know absolutely nothing about a language. You just hear noises all day from strange beings. One day you realize that some of those sounds the strange beings are making have meaning. You begin to wonder if every sound they make means something. At 16 months, I believe my son has developed some understanding of a trial-and-error scientific method.

"If I make my da-da identify a picture with a sound 10 times, I can be sure that the sound he is saying is the name of the object in that picture." He thinks without words.

This is fascinating simply in that it's fascinating. But it's also fascinating, because I have the power to totally fuck with this child's development. If every time he points to a picture I say a different word, he will be stupid.

He points to the goat.

"Goat." I say.

He points to the pig.

"Pig." I say.

He points to the goat.

"Horse." He points to the goat again.

"Donkey."

What the fuck?! And like that I have thrown off his theory. His theory is based on the assumption that I love him and want him to learn.

But if I'm a sick twist (and to be sure, in some ways I am), I could tell him untrue things, or perpetually shift truths about what I tell him. And in so doing, scar him for life.

(Editorial note: I don't.)

But that's just a way I could, if I were perverted in some way, intentionally scar him for life. The other really interesting thing about fatherhood is that there are myriad ways in which I am probably unintentionally scarring him for life.

For instance, I believe we all develop some amount of fear of the dark in our lives. Maybe this is instinctive. Primal. A fear of being watched. God knows I have it.

I still to this day can be taking a shower, washing my hair, closing my eyes because there's too much soap in them, and all it takes is me picturing someone outside of the shower. I picture that. I picture that I'm being watched. I picture that someone has crept in and is standing on the other side of the shower door ready to pounce.

"This isn't real," I tell myself. But it doesn't matter. It's enough for me to hurriedly rinse the soap out of my eyes and check. I'm 32 years old. Jesus. But it happens. Not all the time. But sometimes.

Or I can remember a time when I was really sick in college. Throwing up. Shitting my brains out. I had a crazy fever. Sweating through the night and waking up freezing, drenched in my bed. Drinking water just to release it minutes later through mouth or asshole. Gross. I know.

At the worst of it, I woke up freezing, soaking wet from a vivid nightmare wherein an evil presence had entered my bedroom. It was standing over me in this nightmare.

I sprang up in bed, my eyes wide open.

I looked across the room. By the door I saw an outline of a figure. I rubbed my eyes.

"I'm imagining things. This isn't real." But then it moves towards me. Scared the shit out of me.

I know now there was nothing there. But I was so tripped out from dehydration, being sick, nightmares, and the Tylenol PM, that I really thought something was there.

It took reaching out and trying to punch it to convince myself there was no presence. And I fell back asleep telling myself that nothing was in my room but me. Terrified.

My son is 16 months old.

Literally every day up until around when he turned one, either my wife, myself, or both of us, have gone into his bedroom before we've gone to bed to look at him.

He's fucking adorable. We're nerds. What can I say.

This practice has lessened of late. But we still do it more often than not.

And every once in a while, when we go in there, he's in a light sleep. He senses our presence. He lifts up his head. And as he's doing it, we hide in his room so he can't see us or we scurry like rats out of his room as he's turning to look.

Last night, we opened his door at 11 PM and took three steps in. After three steps, his head sprung up, and before he could turn to face it, we bolted out the door and closed it.

My son is being watched. There is a presence in the dark. There are things that go bump in the night. Those things are his parents being morons, tripping over blocks and turning off the hallway lights.

This morning my son got out his book.

He pointed to the goat.

"Horse."