The News Just Came in From the County of I'm Looking at the Internet

The news
Just came in
From the County of Keck
That a very small bug
By the name of Van Vleck
Is yawning so wide
You can look down his neck.

This may not seem
Very important, I know.
But it IS. So I’m bothering
Telling you so.

I never noticed, until Zelda was born, my very odd need for repetition and order. Only now, where chaos is born and reborn in the space of a child’s room each day anew do I see it: I do the same things over and over. I write in my journal each day, no matter how mundane the activities I log. I note the temperature and the time. I sometimes count in my head while doing other things for no reason other than I feel like it. I silently stand at the kitchen drawer sorting the silverware after opening the drawer just to get a spoon. It feels satisfying in a way I can’t make sense of. It’s not that I’m overly neat or fastidious; don’t open my clothing drawers, because they are worse than a teen’s.

And so, because I am insane, I take the “make your baby’s bedtime routine the same every single night” thing to heart. Like, seriously: I do the exact same thing down to almost the minute, night in, night out, in the hopes that my daughter, like her mother, will one day grow up to list “sleeping” in her top five life activities. I read Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book to Zelda every single night.

Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book is one thousand, seven hundred and seventy-six words long and has fifty-six pages. It used to take me approximately twelve minutes to read, but now I can mow through it in about eight. By my count, (I counted), I have read the book to her two hundred and ninety-eight times (once I subtract the first horror-ridden weeks where bedtime didn’t exist and the very few nights when someone else has put her to bed). I know the book inside out and backwards. By August — when Zelda was six months old — I was already bragging to friends that I had it memorized (cool brag). My memory was tested a month or two later when I turned down the lights as Zelda finished off her milk, laid her down in her crib, cranked up the white noise, and began, as always, while still cleaning up: “The news just came in from the County of Keck,” I said, reaching for the book which wasn’t there. “Shit,” I realized, “I took it downstairs to tape one of its pages back together earlier today. I can’t leave the room; I’m going to have to wing it.”

I did. I could. I didn’t fuck up, not once. I remembered Van Vleck and the Biffer-Baum birds, the Herk-Heimer Sisters and the old drawbridge draw-er. I remembered the stilt-walker walkers, the Hinkle-Horn Honkers, the Collapsible Frink and Jo and Mo Redd-Zoff. I didn’t forget the Hoop-Soup-Snoop Group or the Curious Crandalls or the Chippendale Mupp or Mr. & Mrs. J. Carmichael Krox. Of course the sleepers at the Zwieback Motel were recalled, as were Snorter McPhail and his Snore-a-Snort band, plus the two Foona-Lagoona Baboona and of course, my favorite, Jedd. The Offt I remembered and the fucking Moose and the goddamned Goose too. Who could forget the Bumble-Tub Club? Or the five foot-weary salesmen taking a load off from a long day of trying to peddle Zizzer-Zoof seeds? And the worm and the fish and the whale and “good night.”

The Sleep Book, and parenting in general, has given me a wide range of ways to explore and recognize my more insane, compulsive desires. I test myself every evening: I count in my head the number of pages left as I “read.” These days, sometimes I literally phone it in: Zelda half asleep, barely listening, passing out in the crib, me writing sick burns on Twitter, my iPhone hidden in the book whose pages I don’t bother turning anymore. I snap photos of her curled into a ball and drop them into GroupMe or Slack. I email editors. I browse baby clothes on the Gap.com. All while reciting this poem, all two hundred and forty-seven lines of it. And I do this, not because I’m fully bored (though man I am bored some evenings), but because I like the challenge of multitasking. I like to see what all I can do while not fucking up my beautiful recitation of The Sleep Book.

Another way my compulsions reveal themselves is in Zelda’s toy collection. One afternoon a few months ago, my friend Lisa and I had hauled our daughters in the cold to Play, a sort of indoor playground for babies and toddlers in Greenpoint. It’s just a large open space with padded floors and a ton of toys in bins. Sitting there on the floor in the chaos as our babies did baby stuff, I watched the girl working there periodically and methodically putting away the toys. She wasn’t just chucking them into the bins however: she was slowly and gently organizing them: the play food into one bin, the toy cups and plates in the next. The bristle blocks together, the sorting blocks together. She did it almost as a reflex, a soothing and gentle ritual, it seemed to me. It seemed that way to me because I recognized it, and I longed to join her.

I remarked to my friend that I too, did this at the end of every night. Not because I wanted the things out of sight exactly, but because I felt a keen sense of fulfillment from seeing like with like. For instance, Zelda has a little bucket shape sorter: there are two square blocks, two star blocks, two circles, and so on. For months now, at the end of each day, I count them out as she lays in bed to make sure all ten are there in the bucket where they belong. I put all of the musical instruments together in a bin. I sort the books by type or size and shape and sometimes, as I said, alphabetically. Even when I am just dead tired, I go through some form of this ritual. I just hadn’t thought about it until I saw someone else — who was being paid to do it — doing it.

And the book, that’s it. It’s a ritual. I can’t NOT finish the book. Even if Zelda is totally zonked out, I almost always see it through to the end. I feel something tickling inside me: I want the book to be over — dear God why did I choose a bedtime story that is so fucking long — but I can’t not finish I MUST FINISH, I must get to the worm on the fish hook. Zelda doesn’t give a shit but I’ll be damned if I walk out that door before every light between “here and Far Foodle is out.”

Being this way has helped me in this past year, because babies are nothing if not creatures of some habit. They seem to flourish on the repetition and the mimicry. Just now, Zelda wiped her hands together as if washing them as I stood at the sink, washing my own grimy mitts. And nothing, I mean nothing makes me happier than to see her newest skill, repeated and repeated: Picking up her shape sorting blocks and returning them to their bucket, one by one. When she immediately dumps them out again, I feel safe in the knowledge that she knows where they go now.

Sometimes I randomly blurt out, in the middle of the day, just to see what happens: “The news just came in from the County of Keck.” Invariably, Zelda looks at me, smiling but bewildered, as if to say, “not now: it isn’t the right time.” She is already learning that there is a time, and a place, for everything. If she is still awake, at night, when I get to the end of The Sleep Book, she always smiles and lays her cheek onto the mattress, as if giving up on the day finally, when I get to the same point:

Ninety-nine zillion,
Nine trillion and two
Creatures are sleeping!
So…
How about you?

When you put out your light,
Then the number will be
Ninety-nine zillion
Nine trillion and three.

Good night.

The Parent Rap is an endearing column about the fucked up and cruel world of parenting.