Night Terrors

Published in The Atlantic in 1995

Illustrations by Miki Lowe

Many of us assume, when we’re young, that our parents know what they’re doing. Only when we’re older do we realize that they were making it up as they went; that they were scared; that they were tasked with something—protecting us—that was never fully possible.

I imagine the poet Alan Shapiro knows this well. His parents outlived two of their three children, both of whom died of cancer in adulthood: a cruel fate that they could never have prevented. And Shapiro has faced his own limitations in trying to help his son cope with psychiatric illness. In one essay, he described standing outside his son’s bedroom door, day after day, calling his name but not knowing what else to do. “I was anxious about leaving him alone and equally anxious about intruding,” he wrote. And later: “I’d become so disheartened in recent weeks that I took to picturing Nat inside a coffin, as if to ready myself for what I couldn’t keep from happening.”

In “Night Terrors,” Shapiro describes that fear of inadequacy. Even as the speaker calms his frightened child in the night, he feels like an imposter—like he was taken over by a spirit that could summon the perfect gentle authority. A parent, Shapiro implies, can still be someone’s fearful kid. But that might be why they respond so viscerally to their child’s vulnerability—why they rush to the bed so quickly, ready to soothe. They remember what it’s like to need a voice in the dark. They never stopped needing it.

— Faith Hill

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