Through A Glass, Darkly

I don't know when it first started, but my in-laws seemed to have found a way to put my youngest daughter to sleep. I used to play her a song, Bon Iver's "Skinny Love," maybe a strange and tragic song to play to a one-year-old, since it concerns a mental breakdown of a loved one (The first lines are: "Come on, Skinny Love, just last the year / Pour a little salt we were never here / My my my my my my my my / Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer. . . ."), but perhaps she has since caught onto the lyrics and now only wails when I play it. So, I asked, "What's the secret?"

My mother-in-law said, "Just tell her 'spider's coming,' and she goes right to sleep."

Spider's coming. Again, I had to revert to terrifying her into sleeping.

But it worked. I would say "spider's coming" and she would pull up the covers to her chin, close her eyes, not even peek, and soon enough, she slept.

My wife was concerned that creating the image of a spider crawling toward her to eat her if she didn't sleep seemed extreme. My other daughter, however, jumped on this, and embellished the horrific attributes of this imaginary spider. "Spider's coming, B! He's as big as our house, with giant fangs. If you don't sleep, he will get you. And he will wrap you in a bed (web). And he will suck out your insides. And he will chew your bones clean."

I hate to say I was impressed with her morbid description. She looked at me for approval, and I replied, "Uh, yeah, now go to sleep."

And she slept.

One day while my daughter slept, and I finally got a chance to write (yes, the real motive for my insistence in her taking a nap), I thought about Through A Glass Darkly, one of my favorite Bergman films, in which one of the story-lines consists of a second-rate writer using his daughter's emerging mental illness for his own literary gains. And then there's the ending, that brilliant ending, of course (and I'll be clandestine for those who have not had the chance to watch this masterful film and just leave it at that).

Perhaps since the beginning of time, we terrified our children into sleeping, recounting how witches will bake them into gingerbread, how wolves will slip into the gowns of their grandmothers to eat them, how queens take them away from us to a snowy hell, leaving a shard of ice in their hearts. Then again, maybe I'm the only one who is still doing this, still telling his children these types of fairy tales without sparing them the scary parts. Even my off-the-cuff fairy tales are remarkably grim, despite my best intentions to sugarcoat them mid-sentence.

There was a recent story in The Telegraph about the growing concern these fairy tales had on our children's imagination (See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/4125664/Traditional-fairytales-not-PC-enough-for-parents.html). Nevertheless, it's a tough balance between giving them a saccharine-laced Disney childhood, which I feel is equally dangerous since it doesn't teach them morality or consequence, instead of telling them something that will scare the hell out of them into being moral.

But my wife's concerns are legitimate. The last thing I want for my daughters was an irrational fear that followed them throughout their lives, much like all my irrational fears have followed me, all of which are too many to recount in this posting alone. However, isn't that the essence of fairy tales? Shouldn't they be wary of strangers and unafraid to report bad people to the nearest policeman (woodsman)? Shouldn't they know life is dangerous, filled with people who are not looking out for their best interest, and if they are going through it lackadaisical, they can find that they've been swindled in a Rumpelstiltskin-like deal?

Isn't it truly dangerous to have an imperfect perception of reality where all we hear and know are happy, G-rated tales? I think it is, because a lack of imagination or ignorance of a darker reality will cause a child to show his chubby finger and not a bare bone, or to climb willingly into the witch's oven.

Anyway, today marks the end of "spider's coming." See, my older daughter shot out of bed from her nap and started screaming, thinking, because her bed was now empty, that the spider finally got me while she slept. As much as she could relate to me through her tears, her dreams of horses and trees that grew chocolate bunnies were interrupted when a giant, hairy spider crawled alongside the walls, up the staircase, broke down the bedroom door, and spun her unsleeping father into a cocoon, taking me back to its lair in order to feed a thousand spider babies. I guess I put up a good fight against this Shelob, at least.

So, I folded my hand. I told her the spider does not exist, never has existed, except in stories. I promised we will stop telling this story to her sister to convince her to sleep. She was relieved. Thus, the spider was dead.

Now, I got to come up with something new. Maybe I should just rock her to sleep with an older song, sing to her: "Go to sleep, little baby / go to sleep little baby / you and me and the devil makes three / don't need no other lovin' baby". But seems a lot of lullabies are sad, too, you know, cribs falling out of trees, bridges falling down, and the like.

So, I reread them the story of The Little Mermaid, whose new feet are not stabbing with excruciating pain, leaving a trail of blood behind, and who, in the end, does not sacrifice herself by throwing herself into the water to dissolve into sea foam, but instead this is The Little Mermaid, who rescues her prince from the clutches of the Sea Witch's spell and sails with her new husband far, far away from her father's utopian kingdom.

Even I don't yet have the heart to tell my children that a lot of stories don't have happy endings.