Last week, our power went out. Again. If you also live in Upstate NY you might think I’m talking about the huge outages from our recent ice storm, but luckily (for us) I am not. This was on a warmer day about a week earlier, a day with high spring winds. (The power outage is going to function as a metaphor here, though, so feel free to imagine any recent power outage you wish.)
Just before dusk, on that oddly warm March night, the electricity in our house ground to a halt. Suddenly it was totally silent. The only hum we could hear came from the near-imperceptible buzzing of conscious life: the birds outside, gripping their talons on the fence, guarding against the strong wind; the dog’s breath, panting; the sudden uptick of nervous energy from the three human beings in the twilight of the living room.
My phone buzzed. It was our next door neighbors, checking to see if we too had lost power. The sun sunk further in the sky. I peered out the window and noticed that the row of larger houses across the street all had their glowing streetlights on—somehow the power grid is split down the center of our street, and our whole side loses power when theirs does not.
We went looking first for the lantern, a plastic red flashlight-adjacent tool that gets used more often in imaginative play than emergencies—it was, unsurprisingly, nowhere to be found. I rustled around in the drawer of the dresser we use as a buffet. Luckily, my Christmas craft this year involved candlesticks and we had a surfeit of Trader Joe’s brand tapers ready to be lit. Remembering what my mother taught me, I dripped wax into the candleholders first, so the tapers would stick. I felt the power of my ancestors coursing through me as I gazed into the black-purple center of the flame.
At first, we waited. Certainly it would come back on soon, and then we could get on with our evening. But then 7pm came and went, and the house got darker. The candles flickered unattended in various unsafe locations. Our windowless bathroom was as dark as a crypt until I placed one of the cut glass candlesticks by the soap dispenser. The room seemed unstable, ever-shifting, jolted by the shadows of the single flame. There would be no bath time tonight, I decided. Rosalind yawned. We would need to make a decision.
That morning I’d been texting B, who just had a baby. She was remarking on the absolute wonder that is white noise, and how it worked as an instant sleep charm for her newborn. Brand new babies, accustomed to the whooshing, clanging, gurgling and thrum of the womb, suddenly startled by the quiet of their carefully appointed nursery, the whispered hush of their parents.
We were delaying bedtime for this very reason. Rosalind has slept the last four years ensconced in the loud blare of Mr. Whale, as we call him, a beluga-shaped white noise + star light + song player + story teller that my friend J sent us, going totally off-registry to provide us with something she was certain we’d need. She was right. When we travel, Mr. Whale comes with us, packed in the suitcase, choked by his long white cord. There is no bedtime without Mr. Whale. When he begins his siren song, plunking notes of hush little baby, even the dog knows it’s time to leave the room.
On top of that, Mr. Whale has a new companion, a nameless Hatch light, which signals “dark pink” (Rosalind’s favorite color) for sleep, and electric green for wake-up. She's used to sleeping with the white noise, the stars, and the dark pink glow of the eighty-dollar cylinder lamp, not in the total silent darkness of an electricity-less night. It seemed that the infrastructure we’d been building for the last four years had collapsed in the time it took a pine tree branch to snap off in the wind.
Jimmy emerged from the basement holding something strange in his hand.
“I couldn’t find the lantern,” he said, “but what about this for a nightlight?” he held up a long, plastic tube.
“What is that?” I asked, as he pressed a button, and the tube lit up red.
“It’s a lightsaber,” he said, gleefully, as though I was already familiar with the arsenal of space weapons we kept next to the washing machine. “This should work,” he said, showing Rosalind, “just don’t… move it around.”
Jimmy demonstrated, swinging the weapon through the air. The tube emitted a horrible crackle as it penetrated the invisible force field of our darkened living room. Vuhwooorrushhtt! the light saber sang, vuhwooorrushhtt!1
Rosalind grabbed it and gestured violently, a little too close to the flickering candles. No one, I thought, would be sleeping on the Death Star tonight.
After creating a tower of library books atop her dresser, Jimmy placed the lit-up and now-motionless saber out of toddler reach. The room warmed a little under its red glow. I checked the National Grid website again. It said the Estimated Restoration Time was “TBD.”
I texted B back. “And here is the one disadvantage to the white noise addiction,” I wrote. “Our power is out now, and Rosalind is wailing I can’t sleep like this!”
Indeed, she was. But there was nothing else to do now but explain the situation to her, again, and hope for the best.
“Tonight,” I said, “you’ll need to be brave,” I told her. “I know you can sleep just fine, even without Mr. Whale.” After a tantrum about the out-of-reach light saber, she surrendered and crawled into bed, pulling the blanket up all the way to her chin.
Worried she would climb out of bed again without the numbing blast of white noise, I crouched next to her door to listen in.
“Get me the monitor,” I whisper-screamed to Jimmy, who went looking for it in the dark of our bedroom. What is taking him so long, I wondered, as my crouching legs began to fall asleep. I saw Jimmy, motioning at me. I clawed my way up again to get closer to hear his mouthed words.
“The camera in her room doesn’t work, Olivia,” he shout-whispered. “There’s no electricity!” Right. Duh.
“You sit here then,” I shout-whispered back. “I can’t get back down.”
The dog was whining so I went to let her outside. I went with her, cautious of the wind still whipping boldly through the oddly warm dusk. The yard was dark. I peered up into our trees, trying to see if any branches had come down. I crept over to take a closer look at the furthest white pine, passing the fire pit. In the gloaming, I was suddenly wistful.
I knew this would happen, even when I couldn’t possibly imagine it: that one day, I would think back on the deep pandemic fondly. The fire pit, this yard, and how much time we once spent out here. Even in the darkest winter, we’d had friends over, plastic lawn chairs around a roaring fire, beer cans chilling in the surrounding snow. Long underwear and wool hats. Adult conversation and a sense of togetherness, whipped cold cheeks, aching fingers.
Back inside, I crept over to the door. There, Jimmy and I heard Rosalind singing quietly to herself, a new song we’d never heard before that went like this: “go to sleep, go to sleep my darling…” Perhaps it was a brand new song, made up for that specific, exciting evening. Or maybe she sings it every night, and we’ve never hear her over the blare of the white noise machine.
We brushed our teeth and got into bed. What else was there to do? All was quiet in the house. Beautiful quiet, but I missed the home’s hum. I lit more candles for our bedside tables. I peered at my stack of books. I chose the mystery in the series about the Benedictine Monk I’m working through. Appropriate, I thought, to read it by candlelight.
So much of parenting still feels… medieval. The diseases these children get, the rashes and fevers and glop leaking out of their eyes. The labor of it, labor itself, the exhaustion of it all, the endless cyclical work done on an ancient calendar. That’s one metaphor. Another related metaphor, since Europe in the middle ages was hardly a time of booming infrastructure, is about support.
Rosalind fell asleep. The power came back on shortly after. We made it through the night without incident. I slept deeply, in fact, and woke rested and calm. I wondered if being surrounded by darkness before bed contributed to my peaceful slumber? This paragraph is about finding the silver linings in the situation, which I did. That is not the point of this essay though.
The point of this essay, or at least what I set out to write about, was an exploration of the loss of support. The power outage was supposed to be a metaphor for the loss of or lack of infrastructure, one of my favorite things to bemoan. This blog started in 2020, as an account of what it was like to raise a new baby completely alone* (*with Jimmy), through the days when nothing was as we’d expected it to be. The pandemic took away those early years of support, of community, and revealed how much was already missing from our shared infrastructure. In its lapping wake, I am keenly aware of the continued absences.
Some are personal—we are, in so many ways, still doing this “completely alone.” There are no grandparents swooping in to take over, there are no sisters or brothers nearby to pop in. We have daycare; we have loving friends. We have jobs and our health and a safe place to live. We can absolutely get by for a few hours, on a warm night, without electricity. We can even read by candlelight—it is amazing the power a single flame holds. There are so many ways we are making this work, but all of them, at times, feel like candles in a darkened house.
Thanks for reading Mom Blog. Mom Blog’s usual posting schedule (I STRIVE FOR TUESDAYS) has gone a bit haywire, due in part to the issues mentioned in the essay. No one really cares, I don’t think, but if you want to get updates on almost nothing except when the blog is coming out, follow me on Instagram.
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Speaking of heart emojis: ❤️ like this post ❤️ if you liked it because I’m actually using like-energy to run an electrical grid here (metaphorically speaking).
One more demand: comment below on what you DO have and DON’T have in terms of personal necessary infrastructure for basic human survival. Or tell me about if you lost power recently, and for how long, and at what point did you break down and eat all the ice cream in case it melted first?
Until then,
I hope you sleep all night long,
xo, Olivia
Jimmy created this word from scratch after I texted him to demand he describe the sound of a light saber. Then I asked, “what’s the name of the space ship where they fight,” which is how I know what the Death Star is. Here at Mom Blog, I promise to always credit my sources.
"The room warmed a little under its red glow." OF COURSE JIMMY IS SITH.
Also I'm happy to be a surrogate stop over (down?) sister. 😘
My contribution to this conversation: America needs to talk about alloparents so more people (like me) can identify themselves as such. BRB getting link...