nap-trapped

mother as flaneur, happy captivity, and exhaustion

The landscape of my baby’s sleep is ever shifting. Right now, he sleeps best in the car. I’ve taken to facilitating at least one car nap each day for him while his brother is with grandma so that he can get some decent daytime sleep. Sometimes this happens naturally — the other day he napped in the car both to and from a friend’s house. But most days, the car naps mean I’m spending that fraction of the day stuck in the car for no good reason with him. The moms-these-days like to call this phenomenon “nap-trapped,” whether in a car or in a rocking chair under a contact-napper. Nap-trapped I’ve been, daily, for weeks now.

Oh, it isn’t too bad. I usually listen to something — a podcast, music, an audiobook. I don’t dislike driving. Sometimes I just drive a straight shot down the less-busy direction of the highway, away from the city, then turn around at some exit and drive straight back. Occasionally I’ll work a grocery pickup in and pray the baby doesn’t wake up to the rustling of the bags passing through my car window. Sometimes I’m even productive! I take a jaunty picture of my computer on my passenger seat and joke on instagram that my car is my new office, lol! Recently the baby has been able to keep sleeping for a while while parked (this didn’t used to be the case), so I can park in either my driveway or my parents’ driveway and use the wifi to write or edit stuff or answer customer service emails.

But I also waste the time, probably more more than I use it well. I half-heartedly scroll on instagram. I watch tik-tok videos where other seemingly car nap-trapped moms are loudly talking into their front-facing camera about being nap-trapped. This baffles me. I would never dream of talking loudly while my sleeping baby is in the car, even with the ocean wave white noise playing steadfastly beside him. I try to stay as quiet as possible, on pins and needles watching the monitor for signs of eyes fluttering open if I rustle my fleece too loudly. Heaven forbid I try to go through a drive-through (not that I can eat much of anything in the fast food treat department, being dairy-free). Once again, confronted with the reality that every mom’s experience is an alternate universe version of every other mom’s, completely dependent on so many variables. No two babies are alike, and no two moms are either. I guess those moms can talk on tik tok all they want while nap trapped and those babies don’t wake up. They probably sleep through the night too, I think to myself. But what does it matter? What’s mine is mine.

These car naps feel like a maternal purgatory. This is a category of existence that has become so profoundly common in these little-kid years. The mother, neither here nor there. The mother, willfully giving up her agency for an hour or two so the child can nap. I could do the nap at home, I really could, but something about the way he sleeps so deeply and seems to be so cozy in the car brings me back. I want sleep for him, so I drive him in loops around my hometown.

My mom tells me that she drove me for almost every nap when I was a baby. She would drive for a little bit until I seemed deeply enough asleep, then park the car in the garage with me still inside it and go about her day until she could hear me crying downstairs. That sounds like the kind of thing that was probably common practice in the nineties and wouldn’t fly now in terms of “safe sleep” — but is my baby napping in the car with me standing by any different, really? Except for my trappedness? I think about this little window in my own history, my life as a baby. I can’t remember being driven around in my little bucket seat. I don’t think I have any extra proclivity to fall asleep in the car now, don’t think that the experience of car naps had any sort of lasting effect on my life. But there is something meaningful to me about the parallel loops I am making driving my baby in circles around these same streets my mother drove me to sleep on. I could write a whole other essay about moving back to my hometown as an adult, but the poetry of this particular experience is not lost on me. I can almost hear some wise old maternal voice echo, “Drive as you have been driven, child.” Caregiving is such an act of long-awaited reciprocity. It is my joy to take care of my babies, because people who loved me took care of me.

My favorite car naps lately have been the ones where the baby isn’t quite settled while I am parked so I have to just sort of wander around in the car, keeping it moving. This throws the whole question of productivity out the window, which is honestly a relief. I become a bit of a flaneur, strolling the streets, leisurely driving wherever I please. I have visited parts of town I’ve never been to before, taking that road near the Target that I never knew where it went. I drive through neighborhoods near my own childhood home, perusing the midcentury suburban houses. Sometimes when parked I pull up zillow to investigate further. I revisit favorite places, favorite strips of forest or meadow or subdivision. My hometown is so beautiful, and woven into me like my own veins. Wooded roads alongside creeks, little hidden acres, pretty houses on forest lots built from the fifites on, big hills and twists and turns alongside the strip malls. I peek through bare trees to see houses that are usually hidden by leaves. So many people live here, me included. My children will grow up here like I did. I drive around a loop I used to make myself jog in high school, when I hated my body and thought I should be thinner when I was already so thin. The house where I babysat for my former first-grade teacher. The house of a friend who had a hot tub. The most beautiful neighboring suburb across the river with century-old million dollar houses that look like something out of a novel. I have lived other places that I loved, but this little part of Pennsylvania will always be my most safe place. I drive wherever I please, a small radius. I am nowhere and anywhere I wish.

There’s something comforting about letting this season swallow me up with its demands. I’m deeply tired. Maybe I need this hourlong drive too, more than I need time in the studio or to complete any given task. That has been the surprise of this second postpartum — this sensation of setting everything else aside to just care for the children, and finding little half-freedoms within those constraints. It isn’t the same as actual free time, which I usually use to start some sort of new project or business. I’m good at keeping busy, good at making things out of nothing. From this nothing, I make nothing. Nothing except our bodies moving forward through the day. Nothing except what we need, no more. My mind does not wander, it loops. Captivity is calm, and often sweet. I don’t want to be here forever, please no, but I can be here now.

Ben is the sweetest baby. He does not sleep well, but he is jolly and bright and loves to be wherever people are. His brother makes him laugh endlessly. He smiles so big when he realizes its time to wake up in the morning and finally all be together again. I know this second time around to both cherish this time and let it drain away like water. I know all the particular hard things of this week or last will pass and change very soon. Maybe too soon. I resist the need to keep innovating — instead I turn these little hometown loops, do what works, not think about it any harder than that. He will only need this once, this one year of both of our lives. I can be this nap-driver for him.

The gas money lifts into the air as smoke. I try not to keep the engine running for too long, but sometimes it’s just too cold not to. Forgive me, earth, I think. She understands. She’s a mother too.

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When I have occasionally been able to be productive during my car naps, I’ve been working on the next Imaginary Lake zine. It’s a poetry chapbook, and I’m really excited to share it, hopefully soon! Keep an eye out.

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