The Night Shift at Home

The piece of paper on our fridge begins with the words "Where things are." Underneath are several locations that I thought I knew until I needed to find them in the dark.

Spare clothes: second drawer. Clean cloths: basket by the cot. The little towel my wife means when she says the little towel: not the other little towel. I added that last distinction after a difficult conversation at half past three.

Our daughter is four months old. We have a collection of photographs in which she looks peacefully asleep and almost none in which either of us does. When people ask how it is going, I tend to tell them about the smiles. My wife sometimes tells them about the laundry. Both accounts are accurate.

Last night I stood in our living room with a damp cloth over one shoulder, carrying our daughter while my wife tried to get back to sleep. The street below had become quiet enough that I could hear the fridge. I remembered thinking, before she was born, that I would use the quiet hours to read.

The paper on the fridge

At first I kept asking my wife where things were. I thought asking was better than making a mistake. Each question seemed small. Added together, they meant she was directing the room even when I had offered to take over.

Sometimes she would start answering before she had properly opened her eyes. I became very good at following instructions and much less good at learning the room. The next night I would need some of the same instructions again.

One afternoon I went through the drawers while our daughter slept. I asked the questions then, when my wife wasn't trying to sleep as well. We moved a few things and left others where they already made sense. I wrote the locations down, partly because I knew how confidently I could forget a simple detail.

The fridge paper is not an especially elegant system. There is an arrow drawn through one line because the place changed. One entry is in my handwriting and another in hers, and the word for the basket has been corrected twice. It is much more useful than my earlier promise that I would remember.

We also began saying what we meant by a turn. "I'll take her" could mean I would hold her for ten minutes, or that I would manage the next stretch while my wife rested. If I didn't specify, I could hand her back feeling helpful while my wife had barely begun to fall asleep.

Now I try to say the next concrete thing. I will change the clothes. I will walk with her for a while. I will clear up afterwards. There are limits to what I can take over, especially when she needs feeding, but I can do the surrounding work without making another person organise it.

I still get the wrong towel occasionally. The difference is that I can usually discover that for myself before asking someone who is asleep.

Holding the room together

Before becoming a father, I pictured care as the visible part: carrying the baby, making her laugh, appearing in a photograph with a small head against my chest. A surprising amount of the work happens around that picture.

There are bottles or cups to wash, clothes to separate, a place to clear so the next thing can be put down. Something used at two in the morning needs to be ready again later. An empty packet left on a shelf becomes a small problem for the next person.

I work with systems all day and still managed to treat our home as though the necessary objects replenished themselves. My wife would ask whether I had put a clean cloth back, and I would remember that I had used the last one. Holding our daughter had felt like the whole task. I had left the end of the task on the sofa.

One night I put everything back before sitting down. It took only a few minutes. The next time we got up, there was a clear space and the things we expected were there. Nothing remarkable happened. That absence of a new problem was the reward.

The same applies to food. I used to ask what my wife wanted to eat at the point when she was already hungry. The question sounded considerate. It sometimes arrived with the unspoken request that she plan the meal too.

I have a short list of things I can make reliably without a discussion. On tired evenings I choose one, check whether we have the ingredients, and ask only about the part that genuinely needs deciding. The food is ordinary. Rice, soup, something from a pan. We are both less interested in a good photograph than in being able to sit down.

I am not always this sensible. Sometimes I leave a kitchen that looks as though dinner required three different cooks to argue in it. Then I go back and deal with the pans. I am trying to stop describing the cleanup as an extra favour.

A morning without a score

Tired people can become very precise about time. I can remember the minute I last got up and fail to notice the three occasions on which my wife got up before that. We have both had mornings when the conversation began with a small calculation.

I understand why. When sleep comes in pieces, a piece feels valuable enough to defend. The problem is that a tally of visible turns leaves out much of what happened. Feeding, worrying, listening for a sound and not quite falling asleep do not fit neatly into the same column.

One morning I announced that I had been awake for nearly two hours. My wife looked at me for a while and said, "I know." I had offered the information as if it were news only I could possess.

I washed my face, made tea and came back with a better question about what needed doing next. We still talked about the night. It helped to do it after eating something, with a little more light in the room.

There are days when one of us needs more help than the other, and fairness looks uneven for a while. We try to say that plainly. I have a deadline. She has had a particularly bad night. We can make a plan for the afternoon without deciding that one difficult day describes our whole marriage.

I have also become more careful about praising myself. Telling a story about how much I did overnight can quietly turn my wife into the audience for work she is also doing. A simple description is usually enough. Sometimes the only thing worth saying is that there are clean clothes in the second drawer.

The mornings I like best begin without either of us producing evidence. One person makes room for the other to sit down. The baby looks at a patch of light on the wall. We drink half a cup of tea before it cools and refill it later.

My father answers the phone

My parents are in Quảng Bình. When they call, our daughter often becomes unusually quiet and studies the screen. My mother takes this as evidence that she recognises her. My father waits for a chance to make a noise that I remember him making at younger cousins.

I called one morning after a broken night and began complaining before I had properly said hello. My father listened. Then he asked whether I had eaten breakfast. I thought he had missed the point.

He hadn't. He was offering a place to start that didn't require us to solve being tired. I put the phone down for a few minutes, ate the bread that was already on the table, and called back. The second conversation was less dramatic.

Later he told me about walking with me when I was small. His version contained no heroic detail. He remembered a particular stretch of floor and having to be quiet near the room where my mother was sleeping. I had never thought to ask him about that stretch of floor before.

"We walked up and down," he said. "Where else would we go?"

I kept that sentence in mind the following night. I had been treating each unsettled hour as a problem I ought to be clever enough to remove. Sometimes there was a practical thing to check. Sometimes the useful action available to me was simply to be there, walking carefully, while someone else rested.

It is strange to meet an earlier version of your father after knowing him for nearly three decades. I know the man who asks whether the motorbike needs servicing and gives me fruit to carry back to Hanoi. Behind him is a younger man who once stood in a different room, just as unsure of what would work.

My mother joined the call and corrected a detail in his account. They disagreed about which room it had been. Then our daughter made a sound and both of them forgot the argument. I turned the phone so they could see her properly.

The people who bring lunch

A friend came round with food on a Sunday. He didn't announce a long visit or ask us to prepare anything. He handed me the bags, asked which containers we wanted to keep, and sat for a short while before leaving. We ate after he had gone, grateful that lunch was already a decision made.

I used to arrive at other people's homes ready to be entertained. If they had a baby, I wanted to hold the baby and hear the story. I hadn't thought much about what happened after the visitors left. Now I notice whether someone puts a cup back in the kitchen or leaves it beside the chair for us to find later.

When friends ask what they can do, we are getting better at giving a small honest answer. Bread would be useful. Please call before coming upstairs. Today is a bad day for a long visit. Most people are relieved to know, and the visit is easier for everyone.

Six minutes before seven

At the end of a night, the flat becomes a different place without much changing inside it. A motorbike starts below the window. The sticky-rice seller calls from the road. The shapes of the chairs become clear enough that I stop worrying about bumping into them.

There was a morning this week when I noticed the clock at six fifty-four. I had spent much of the previous hour wishing for seven, though nothing particular was scheduled to happen at seven. It had become a small finishing line in my head.

Our daughter was looking at me. She had caught a fold of my shirt in one hand and was opening and closing the other. I adjusted my hold, checked that my wife was still asleep, and stood by the window for a few minutes.

I wasn't suddenly grateful for being exhausted. I was still tired, and I wanted to sit down. But I was able to look at the person I was carrying without thinking only about the clock. She studied my face as seriously as I had once studied an error I didn't understand.

When my wife came out, I told her where the clean things were and what had already been done. Then I passed our daughter over and made breakfast. I forgot the spoon and went back for it. The rice cooker clicked off while I was opening the drawer.

Later I slept for a while. When I woke, there was a new pile of washing and a message from my mother asking for another photograph. I took one when the light was good. In it our daughter looks wonderfully rested.

I sent it, put the phone down and folded the cloths that had dried by the window. The little towel went in the place my wife had shown me. This time I got the right one.

— John