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Jackie Pike told them that she ends up watching Bluey even after the kids are asleep, especially when Hayden's on an extended roadie with the team.
"There's a lot going on. I don't know exactly what else to say but I think it's written for parents as much as for kids. I even have some friends without kids who are watching it. One of them said it's cheaper and easier to schedule than therapy. Everyone seems to have their favorite episodes. I have some suspicions about which ones you might like but I don't want to spoil it. All I'll say is you might want to start with season 2.”
Shane and Ilya file that away, waiting until the kid is a little older to bother with shows.
Some time later, Ilya finds himself home with a sick toddler. They had all been going to travel to New York together in the name of a stack of endorsement deal meetings, but had a plan that involved a stop at the Prospect Park Zoo and a children's museum nearby in Brooklyn.
Maya had turned up with some kind of bug the day before and it seemed like a kindness to all involved to keep her home instead of flying as planned or, shudder to think, driving the seven plus hours to New York City. Shane couldn't back out of the meetings, so he flew out on his own and Ilya stayed home with a feverish, overtired Maya.
The kid herself was a little up and down, but right now she was passed out sleeping on Ilya's chest in her jellyfish-print footie pajamas, both of them on the couch that was long enough for Ilya to stretch out on as the sun set outside. One of her tiny hands was twisted into the old Raiders shirt he was wearing, the shirt at least a decade older than her, worn into threadbare softness. Her other arm clutched Yoshi, her beloved stuffed hedgehog close against her little body.
Even while she was asleep, Ilya always watched things that were kid-friendly when Maya was in the room, just as a matter of principle. The Soyuzmultfilm compilation he'd had on from YouTube had just run out and it was about to start something that looked annoying and Jackie's recommendation came back to him.
He scrolled through the episode titles, settling on one called Sleepytime. It opens on a family of dogs running through the kids’ bedtime routine. After reading books, the younger kid tells her mom that she wants to sleep through the night in her own bed. Ilya chuckles to himself, thinking about how every night was a countdown to Maya’s heavy steps padding into their room and nestling herself in between Ilya and Shane on the bed.
Quickly it moved into a dreamscape with the younger sister hatching out of the earth in space, her toy rabbit hatching out of the moon a moment later. The show cut back and forth between the dream and the sleeping house.
In the dream the younger sister swam through space, visiting the planets in the solar system, floating across them one by one. In the house, both sisters sleepwalked between their shared room and their parents’, moving on the muscle memory that carried them effortlessly to safety. There are no words, just the swelling orchestral soundtrack and the occasional child's giggle.
Running along the surface of Jupiter, the older sister joins in, holding hands as they splash along the surface. A cut to the house reveals them both running in their sleep, kicking on their father's belly. Ilya snorts thinking about both Maya and Anya and how much room tiny creatures can take up in even a king size bed. One of the dream dogs gets knocked off the planet. The younger sister jumps into the big spot in the planet and it cuts to the father sitting up howling, holding his crotch after an apparent nut shot. Ilya worries he's going to wake Maya with his laugh.
"She has been taking lessons from you, ptichka," Ilya murmurs, the child sleeping in his chest squirmed, wiping her snotty little nose across his chest.
The father carries her back to her bed, but she sleepwalks right back while he sings exhaustedly to the older sister.
The younger sister is left alone clutching her stuffed rabbit in the bed, cold without blankets. In dreams, they're alone on Pluto, almost the same size as the planet, sitting on it like a large rock in a stream. The planets drift apart and the sun appears, glowing with a distant warmth. They start swimming through space towards it together. The rings of Saturn are made up of a crowd of rabbits just like the stuffed rabbit, racing around the planet. They invite her rabbit to join them, and they embrace before the rabbit joins the spinning crowd. She drops her rabbit on the hallway floor as she sleepwalks back to her own bed.
The younger sister is left alone again, drifting in space. She starts crying and suddenly Ilya is there with her, not watching her as his daughter but as himself.
The mother, who's ended up sleeping alone in the older sister's bed across the room, shoots awake at the sound of her daughter whimpering softly in her bed. She climbs in to hold her and in dream, the younger sister is picked up by a bright passing comet, speeding forward through space, the stars and colors streaking past her in bold lines until she stops abruptly in front of the sun.
Sitting on a small rock in close distance to the sun, the child's mouth falls open in wonder and then in relief, basking in the sun's warmth. Ilya already feels the tears welling up before the show cuts briefly back to the mother holding her daughter before she's the sun again.
The daughter looks back at the cracked fragments of the Earth, floating in space where she had emerged from it. Looking back at the sun earnestly, she speaks the first words in her dream.
"I have to go. I'm a big girl now."
Ilya is the child and the parent at the same time, the tears trailing along his face silently as he struggles to hold his breathing even so as not to disturb the child sleeping on his chest. He can feel the warmth of his own mother at his back, comforting him through the aftermath of a nightmare, holding each other in the dark.
"Remember, I'll always be there for you, even if you can't see me. Because I love you."
The years melt around him and he is in space as well as in his own living room. He is a cowering child, his mother holding him, whispering soft things that matter less than the fact of her presence at the center of his orbit. He is himself, the moment a slimy, squalling child is handed to him wrapped in a thin hospital blanket and the orbit of the earth shifts.
He strokes his daughter's dark curls, kisses her sweaty forehead. The mother in the show kisses her daughter's head as she gets up to go back to her own bed so her daughter can make good on her hope to do a "big girl sleep and wake up in her own bed.”
What must it mean to let go? It was almost a joke the way that Maya constantly wanted to be in her fathers’ arms, the way she crawled into their bed every night, unafraid to demand her place in their lives. It had only been two and a half years, but it was hard to think about a reality that didn’t involve her in close contact at all time.
Jade and Ruby were 12 now. Hayden, of all people, had said something that had haunted Ilya, not that he would admit it as such. The exact wording escaped him, but he’d talked about how you never know when the last time you pick up your child is when it’s happening. Not because they’re not there, but because they don’t need that from you anymore. It’s exciting to watch them grow into their own independence, but sometimes it means watching them go through things that can’t be solved as simply as them curling themselves into the crook of your arm, as if it could hold the world at bay, the way Maya had when whatever it was she’d caught had weighted her down enough that she needed Papa to hold it.
If there was one thing Ilya had learned from the Hollanders, it was that there was always a way to hold your child, though. Not necessarily because they need it, but because there were so many things better held with more than one pair of hands. There were new ways of holding, if you worked to find them.
For the moment, Ilya would content himself with the simplicity of the moment he’d been gifted. Maya would not always be two and a half. It was odd enough having moved out of the part of her life where her age was described in months. He thought for a moment that he hoped Maya didn’t take it for granted that those would always be there too, but before the thought could get away from him, hoped that she did take it for granted, and that it would be a long time before she considered that not all children could fall back to their parents so easily for comfort. It couldn’t hold forever, but it would be a long time before Ilya had to think, each time that he picked up his little girl, if it was the last time he would carry her like that.
: you did not tell me bluey would make me cry. this is supposed to be show for children, yes?
J: was it sleepytime?