Crying It Out
We broke our perfect daughter and I watched the whole thing on a baby monitor like it was a horror movie.
At 2:14 AM on a Wednesday, I am on Reddit.
This is not where you want to be at 2:14 AM. Nothing good has ever happened on Reddit at 2:14 AM. But alas, here I am, in a thread called “baby jet lag HELP,” surrounded by puffy-eyed parents who are pulling their hair out, all asking the same question: can I have the life I thought I had back?
No one tells you about baby jet lag. Well, I guess they do, but it’s buried in a subreddit populated by people whose last remaining brain cells are being spent typing things like “ours was up from 1-4AM every night for two weeks, #neveragain.” These are my people now. We are in the trenches together. We have never met and we are best friends.
Because it is reddit, every piece of advice is naturally a direct contradiction with the prior.
One user writes: Give them whatever they want. Cuddles. Stuffies. They want to wake up, let them. They’ll adjust in 5-7 days.
Let them sleep in your bed, says someone else.
Quiet play in the crib is okay, but do NOT lift them up, decrees another sleepless warrior-parent.
And then there’s the terrifying option. The option that comes with miles of a guilt and warnings and shame. The one that is whispered between two red-eyed parents like it’s a state secret. The nuclear option.
We could let them cry it out.
Here’s what happened. In LA, she wasn’t a great sleeper. We chalked it up to the new location and put up with one wake up per night. It didn’t get dark until we got home from LA. That’s when it became clear that Sadie’s clock was broken. Three hours behind, she was up at midnight, feral at 2 AM, and wide awake by 4. Each tantrum, we’d alternate gently placing her back on her belly, rubbing her back for thirty something minutes and then quietly, desperately attempting to sneak back out before she would stand back up and scream, drawing us back into the room to coddle her until she was fully snoring and oblivious.
The jet lag had taken our beautiful, perfect, always-sleeps-through-the-night daughter and replaced her with a tiny, terrified person who wanted me to watch her sleep from midnight to six AM.
After three nights of blind attempts, pledging allegiance to different Reddit users theories, we finally went for it. We let her cry it out.
And reader, it was devastating. Because I watched the whole thing on the Nanit.
If you don’t have kids, the Nanit is a wifi baby monitor. Ordinarily a handy tool to let us know Sadie is up from her nap, in the middle of the night it became a horror movie in which I was both the audience and the villain. Forever burned in my brain are images of my child in night vision, green and grainy, screaming her guts out, flailing her arms around, attempting to desperately signal anyone — me, Robyn, God — to come save her from the plight of this unconscionable wake up.
We had been there for her each time the previous week and a half.
This time, we were not.
And she was alone. Terrified. Desperate. And you’re just sitting there. Not helping. By choice.
It was the worst fifteen minutes of parenting I have experienced yet. Every instinct in your body says go in there. Pick her up. Fix it. Stop this awful thing from happening. You’re her dad. Save her. Make her life better. That’s your job.
Instead you are staring at a screen watching your baby learn the hardest lesson she’s learned so far in her thirteen months on this planet: sometimes, you have to figure it out yourself.
Slowly, finally, after fifteen minutes that felt like four hours of bloody murder, she limped back down. She rubbed her eyes. She found her stuffed animal, Mr. Bear. She curled up.
And then she slept.
We are a few days out from the Californian Jet Lag Crisis and things appear to have returned to close to normal. But it has changed us. We have seen the war. We will remember.
Welcome to Fool’s Spring
After the coldest, snowiest, most miserable winter in recent memory, New York had its first t-shirt day this past weekend.
There was an energy in the city that felt like everyone had just been released from a rough stint in lockup. Coffee shops had their doors open. Strangers were making eye contact. It was 68 degrees and gorgeous.
But soon this glory will end.
Second Winter is coming. You have a hunch that it’s temporary and you fall for it anyway. You skip the jacket. You let yourself believe. You are an idiot.
It feels so good, even when you know you’re going to be hurt again. The heart wants what it wants. And what it wants is to drink a beer on a patio.
Some Kind Of Paradise!!!
If you are not watching Paradise on Hulu, I need you to stop reading this newsletter and go watch it right now. I’m not kidding. Stop. Go. Watch. TV. It’s. Good.
Sterling K. Brown and the homie James Marsden are joined this season by Shailene Woodley in a post-apocalyptic political mystery that has absolutely no business being this good.
We blazed through four episodes in a row this week. Four! When the last episode available ended, Robyn looked at me and muttered, “you said there was another one.” It broke my heart to tell her we had to wait 24 full hours before episode 5 dropped.
To make matters better, this season is giving vintage Lost. We’ve got a ton of plotlines, infinity holes, and I’m just waiting to figure out why the hell that (metaphorical) polar bear is there. Spanning the country this time, with a weird blur you just can’t quite place, it’s sowing seeds of the deep state while making you cry over a character you just met moments prior. Plus, Elvis?!
But here’s the problem with acting like what was arguably the best serial binge of all time - you gotta put your money where your mouth is.
Lost logged 72 episodes in its first three seasons with 25 whopping hour-long episodes in season one. The premiere, if you’ll remember, was a two-hour masterpiece that shook America to its core, introducing us to the survivors of Oceanic 815, and a rabbit hole that we would gladly fall down until the show’s end six seasons later in 2010.
Paradise is calling it quits after 24 episodes. Total. There were 8 in season 1, they’ve announced 8 episodes this season, and went on record saying there are only three total seasons in its full plan. This is not ok!
Twenty-four hours of television! It seems like a lot, but guys, that’s what we used to get every season. You lived with characters for months, trying to stomach the six days between cliffhanger after gorgeous cliffhanger. And better, it was communal. Our local bar (shout out Lodge on S1st and Havemeyer Street, you were a real one) served Dharma Initiative beer with our weekly watchalong. There were message boards with theories where people met their spouses. We all collectively winced when we found out it was not Penny’s boat (spoiler alert…?).
It was twenty-two years ago. (OMFG.) I get it. It was a different era. And the prestige 8-episode model works. It exists as a microcosm of the new TV landscape: tighter writing, smaller budgets. No one wants to take a gamble. And no one besides Ellen Pompeo is getting that kind of job security.
But something is lost (a pun!) when a show this good is gone after a long weekend. I want to live inside Paradise. I want 25 hours of Sterling K. Brown per year. I want weekly episodes that give me time to theorize and obsess and listen to a sprawling podcast about each subplot. We deserve this!
Instead we get a binge and a void. Fool’s Spring, but for TV. Beautiful while it lasts. Gone too soon. Plunged back into the polar cold to wait for a too brief return (I’m looking at you, Silo).
Fake Chet, Real Feelings
Speaking of things that take a long time: Chet Faker is back. A Love For Strangers is his first album in five years and it’s about damn time. If you aren’t a fan of the Australian bedroom-synth-pop legend, welcome to the show, my guy. Start with Built on Glass and when you’re good and obsessed, travel from there.
A few weeks back, he dropped the new stuff and I have listened maybe 50 times.
The first half is everything you want from vintage Chet: full of bounce and harmonizing, clever synth phrases and lyrics to match. “Over You” and “Far Side of the Moon” are immediate. You’ll be singing along with them by the second listen.
And then the back half gets quieter. More reflective. More still. “A Level of Light” is the kind of song to put on when you’re sitting on the couch and you’re not doing anything and you’re not going to do anything and that’s fine. That’s perfect, actually.
My rec: listen to the A-side during Fool’s Spring. Save the B-side for when it’s winter again, which will be by the end of this week.
Ok. End of the line for this week.
I also wanted to say welcome to the new folks. A few of you have shown up in the last couple of weeks and I just want to say hi and also sorry and also you’re welcome. This is Oh, Cool. I write it every week from wherever I happen to be — a plane, a couch, a rental car, a state of mild delusion. It comes with culture recs, food opinions, parenting dispatches, and the occasional industry rant, akin to what you just witnessed above re: JJ Abrams’ and Dan Fogelman’s magnum opuses.
I’m glad you’re here. Forward this to someone who’d like it. Or don’t. But know that I am extremely online and mildly unhinged about my open rates, so I will find out either way. Like my Nanit, I’m watching you.
Thanks for being here!
Jay