the step

on decompression | plus: best comfort viewing telly

Every evening, somewhere between seven and eight o’clock, one of us will sit on the stairs in half-light. The bannisters silhouetted against the hallway light below - a too-white lightbulb which we haven’t changed because we’re too short to reach it and, well, there are just so many other things to do. The carpet stubbly beneath my thighs. The door to my son’s room the correct level of open. We wait for an unspecified time when we can move downstairs, rarely more than a few minutes.

It started as a compromise, as so many things do. There was a brief, tedious time when we would sit in my son’s room as he fell asleep, creeping out gingerly with muscles that had long atrophied to reclaim what remained of our evening. We had become used to the habit of coming downstairs and silently high-fiving the other adult, the one who wasn’t reading the stories that night, reaching for the glass of wine that waited on the kitchen table.

But then the baby came and everything was thrown up in the air, like a dummy caught in the covers of bed being made. We wouldn’t sit in his room after we said goodnight, like he wanted, but we would sit on “the step” outside it. I think he knows we leave. I think he knows we sometimes never sit there and instead silently attend to laundry or dinner or merely sitting down, exhaling. But we carry on this little dance anyway. He asks if we’ll sit on the step, we agree, on the proviso that he stays in bed. It’s a Shrodinger’s Cat of toddler sleep negotiations.