Snippets of a Single Father II

II: Hush Push & Backaches

Our little place above the garage was tiny, that was for sure. The kitchen was the biggest room with space for a table for us to sit and eat at. The living room was tiny, long and narrow. The rest of the space above the garage consisted of a full bath and two tiny bedrooms across the tiny hall from each other. One bedroom was mine and the other was shared by the girls.

When we first moved in we didn’t have much. We had two baby folding chairs and a princess table, a small TV and one chair for me to sit in. My bedroom was utterly vacant, no mattress or dresser or anything. We were still figuring things out and it was slow going.

The girls’ bedroom had two twin beds and a dresser in it. The room was so small it barely left room to maneuver around them. The two beds were pushed side by side and up against the wall. My oldest slept in the mattress against the wall whilst my youngest slept in the other. On the side of hers was a small space to allow access to a tiny closet. That’s where I would sleep.

On the floor I had laid a three-section folding lounge chair-like thing that my parents had given me. It was some kind of early 1970’s fabric and foam contraption that was neither practical nor comfortable. To add to the negative aspects, its age had rendered the foam into a very weak affair with almost zero support. I’m not even sure why I bothered laying on it at all. I guess it was kind of masochistic.

I set it up on the floor next to my youngest’s bed. It was only about 6 or 8 inches thick. I dressed it up with an old sheet and a small throw blanket. A spare pillow was the only element that could fool me into thinking it was bed-like.

The girls had their ritual of brushing their teeth, washing their faces and then an episode of Death in Paradise on PBS. We didn’t have much choice in channels. We used an aerial antenna and only had reception to about five stations emitted from the top of the Empire State Building, many miles away.

After TV, there was a bit of horsing around and giggling, an inevitable final pee run, perhaps a sneaky snack trip to the kitchen and finally we would lay down. The girls on their beds and me on the bell bottom fabric covered squashed foam backache generating torture device. As soon as I laid down on it, its 8 inch thickness was instantly smooshed to approximately ¼ of an inch thick. It was brutal. This was not a quick torture to get me to talk kind of thing, it was an extended 8 hour backbreaking torture session that lingered all the next day.

My oldest would hold her sister’s hand and I would hold the youngest’s hand reaching up from the floor where I lay. I was so far below them that all I could see was her arm and hand hanging over the edge of the mattress like I was laying at the bottom of a canyon. We would take turns saying a little prayer and then wish each other a good night, sleep tight. Then we would commence with the hush push.

The hush push was a caressing of the hand that both girls enjoyed. My oldest liked doing the hush pushing, preferably on someone aged with thick bulging veins in their hands like either of her grandmothers. The youngest liked to be the receiver of hush pushing. She liked gentle caresses of her hand or foot. In the tiny bedroom we were efficient. I would hush push the little one’s left hand and my oldest would hush push her right. It was kind of perfect for everyone… well, except me… I was on the floor and my back was screaming in pain.

The hush pushing soothed them. Made them feel safe. It was meditative and put them in a calm sleepy state every single time. My back was getting worse and worse every night. Waking up in the morning in excruciating pain, taking a good 15 minutes to peel myself off the floor. I eventually got my own mattress stolen from one of my parents’ unused bedrooms.

Even when I eventually had my own mattress in my own room, I would still go into the girls’ room every night before bed. We would do our ritual of silly TV show, little prayer and hush push until they both fell asleep. After they did so, I loved looking at their innocent faces, drifting off to dreamland. I would shut the light and walk the 2 ½ feet across the hall to my bedroom. At least my back was getting better not having to spend the entire night on the 1970’s psychedelic foam torture contraption, which I finally had the absolute pleasure of putting out on the sidewalk for the garbage men to make disappear.