He Sleeps Longer Here

What caring for my nephews taught me about safety, responsibility, and the quiet ways people learn they're loved.

For most of my life, I’ve never done very well in crisis. Mostly because I was usually the one in crisis. But, even if it was someone else, I would freeze or panic and be of no help at all.

I was also not usually the one given much responsibility. I don’t think it was necessarily because people didn’t trust me, I think it was mostly because I’m the youngest, so I wasn’t the one to watch younger siblings or anything. With my friend groups, I think I just always had a mom friend who took on that role. But it may also have been partly because everyone knew I’m anxious by nature and probably didn’t want to add to that. I’m not sure, I’ve never asked.

But I started working in community mental health when I graduated from college, where I helped treat children across age groups in crisis. I had to be calm with them to help them learn to regulate. It was an adjustment, but I did it. Now, over the last three years, I’ve gotten very involved in caring for my two nephews, who are 10 and 4 now, and I’ve realized I kinda just learned how to stay calm because I had to be the adult in the room for them, too. It’s amazing how fast you learn to weather a storm when a child looks to you to be the one to ground them in it.

It’s a strange feeling to have more responsibility than I’ve ever had. I also help care for my grandparents when I can, and I genuinely enjoy being helpful and contributing when I have time. But if you’d asked me 5 years ago what my life would look like when I was almost 30, I definitely wouldn’t have said anything about taking on these roles and actually executing them effectively.

The 10-year-old is the one I get to spend more time with, and he teaches me more about myself and the world every day. A hike to a waterfall becomes more about kneeling in the dirt to find worms or digging up rocks with sticks than about the trail itself. It becomes wading knee-deep in the pool at the bottom to splash and play, or standing in the stream to skip rocks. Saturday mornings in the Spring are now spent at flag football games, where I attempt, in vain, to learn the rudimentary rules of football, so I have a clue what’s going on.

But, much more noticeably, the problems in our society that I always fought against take on new meaning. I’m not just fighting for a better world for me and the communities I care about anymore. I’m trying to make it better and more just for him and his little brother. I want them to grow up in a world where we all agree Nazis are despicable, they can go to the doctor if they need to, and when they grow up, they can actually earn a good living from working one full-time job, not two or three. I want their schools to teach them how to think critically, not to take a test, and I want them to look to those in power as role models to emulate, not as cautionary tales about what is most wrong with America.

I’ve also learned I’m much more capable than I ever thought I was. When he pushes boundaries, I’m usually fairly level-headed in enforcing them. I’m not an authoritarian by any means, but I make sure he knows what’s acceptable and why. I snap every now and then, but not as much as I’d have thought. Patience had already taken root through my work, so dealing with his tantrums in the early days wasn’t nearly as difficult for me to weather as it would have been. But now, I can get him to school and all his practices, make sure I check his take-home folder, talk to him about school, and still manage to spend time with him so he knows I genuinely care and want to be there. The biggest thing I try to balance is screen time, though. That feels like an uphill battle since I’m not the one he lives with all the time, so there’s only so much I can do. Seeing him glued to the screen mere inches from his face makes me long for the days before smartphones, when he could’ve been glued to a book, building LEGOs, or getting lost outside with neighborhood kids.

I do wonder if I do any of this right, though. If he will look back at these days and remember me as someone who was there when I could be and did my best to love and support him. If he associates my home with safety and stability and love like I try to create for him here. I know it’s entirely possible that I put too much pressure on myself. I find that he usually appreciates things that I wouldn’t have even thought would make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, and everyone around me reassures me that I am doing everything I can. But when he falls asleep on the couch watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, and I pull his Pokémon blanket up to cover him, I brush some of his hair out of his face, and all the anxieties from the day disappear. He sleeps longer here. He feels safe enough to ask me questions. I don’t always have the best answers in the moment, and I kick myself afterward for how I worded them, but he asks, and he listens when I answer (well, as much as a typical pre-teen boy does anyway).

Maybe those things in and of themselves are evidence that I’m doing something right. Maybe you don’t have to show love in grand gestures and the more serious, seemingly consequential conversations. Maybe love just looks like a safe place to eat Goldfish and fall asleep with a giant moose and his favorite cartoon.