Each of these

Would you leave your wife or husband alone in a room to cry? That's the question I asked myself when the doctor told me I had to let Jake cry for awhile when he would awaken in the night. It seemed endless and it was probably about five minutes, but I got up and brought him to our bed; he was around five or six months old by then, as he was in a crib in another room and up until then had been in a bassinet next to, or in our bed.
I didn't have any friends with babies at that point, now the family bed seems so much a part of what people do, but 18 years ago, it was me alone and a crying baby in another room; and there was Eamon, but he was hard to wake up. So, when I thought about being alone and crying it only made sense to me to go get him.
Yesterday at Target, I heard a fellow long before I saw him, and he was pissed. The sound began to come towards me, and I felt a pang of dread, and then humanity crept in and I thought about what it's like to be that far gone. He was wailing by the time his mom got near me in the snack food section, and she was dragging him somewhat and kind of ignoring the episode. He managed to come back on his own after about ten minutes of hard time, and then he had the deep snuffles and was resetting himself. And once again, I was reminded of my very, I think empathetic inquiry, would I drag Eamon through a store if he had big streams of snot and tears all over his face? Yes, yes I would.