I woke up to the sound of crying. It was coming from my son’s bedroom. It was not a wailing cry but rather of a quiet whimpering. I am not a light sleeper, for I can sleep through thunder, storms and screaming sirens. But somehow I was awakened, perhaps it was the parent in me that heightened my sensation to this kind of sounds.

I called my son to come to our bedroom. When he came in and I asked him what was wrong, he answered matter-of-factly, “I cannot sleep.” It was about midnight.

It was just our third night after we came back from the Philippines. With the 14-hour time difference between Manila and Des Moines, it was understandable that our day and night biorhythm was way out-of-order. Though I confess, I had no problem falling asleep that night, as I already started working the next day we arrived, and with my ICU rotation, that made me very tired. In fact, I was even on-call the night before, so my body was so sleep deprived that no amount of jet-lag can keep me from sleeping.

I asked my son to hop into our bed and tried to console him. He is usually jolly most of the times and we know that he is unafraid of the dark. Perhaps it was being alone in the dark with nobody to talk to, while everybody else was sleeping that made him doleful. Or maybe it was the fact that for the past couple of weeks he was sleeping with lots of people (his cousins) in a room, and now all of a sudden he is by his lonesome in his bedroom and he is missing all of them. Or maybe it was just the exasperation of lying awake for more than 2 hours and cannot fall asleep.

My son then asked me what can he do to fall asleep. He asked me this not because he knows that I am a Board-certified sleep expert, but because I am his dad. I told him that he can read a book, but he was not interested in that. I then suggested that he can eat a banana for it has tryptophan that can induce the body to produce melatonin, a natural sleep-inducer, but he was not convinced with my science. (Of course I won’t offer him to take any medications for sleep.) That was when I told him to count sheep. He asked me where did I get that silly idea, and I told him that I learned it not from my medical books but rather from Sesame Street, when I was about his age.

At that point, he already stopped crying. I quietly accompanied him out of our bedroom and back to his room so as not to wake up his mom whom we left sleeping in our bed. I told him he can play with his Lego while I climbed up in my son’s bed and lay there just to keep him company. Maybe I can finally get back to sleep.

However, as I laid there in my son’s bedroom, it was my turn to be wide awake. My mind cannot stop wandering…..

I thought of the many times that I have read bedtime stories to this boy who is now contentedly playing on the floor, and the thousand of times I have tucked him to bed. I also recalled the instance that he called me one night in distress and would not go to sleep as there was a “big” (it was really an itsy-bitsy) spider on the wall near his bed. There were also a few opposite occasions in the past, that we brought him to an evening event but he fell asleep through the show and missed it all. In fact, it was just a little more than a week ago when we were in Manila, and our relatives wanted to show us the new dancing fountain in Rizal Park, but my son was too tired and fell asleep throughout the trip. I ended up taking a video of the fountain instead and showed it to him in the morning. Oh there were more wonderful memories……

After an hour of me lying awake in my son’s bedroom, my wife woke up and came in to the room and joined me in my son’s bed. Several minutes later, my son finally got tired and grab his sleeping bag from the closet and slept on the floor, while me and my wife laid in his bed. Not too long after he was in La La land.

I hope someday my son will remember this night, and appreciate what his old man did for him. I did not do anything really, except lay in his bed and kept him company in one long sleepless night.

Or maybe someday when I am in my golden years, and I feel alone in the darkness of our retirement home, that I will pick up the phone in the wee hours of the morning and call my son to return the favor, and tell him, “Son, I cannot sleep.”