Bedtime is killing me.
Night after night it’s slowly making me lose my will to live. How humanity has survived for thousand’s of years with toddlers and preschoolers and their
bedtime antics is beyond me. Every night, every friggin’ night my kids, my
sweet well-behaved kids, turn into these tiny sanity sucking monsters that make
me want to run screaming for our wolf infested hills. I don’t understand what
the universe is telling me with this. Is it some sort of cosmic challenge we
need to face as parents to reach nirvana?
So this is what goes down
at my house: we have dinner, and everything is normal, a little whining will
occur occasionally, maybe a cry for some dinner time tv, but at this point
everyone still inhabits their own bodies and my kids are relatively normal
albeit a little tired. Then we move on to bath time. Bath time is usually fun,
some splashing, a lot of me yelling at them to keep the water into the bathtub
and not onto the floor, a few admonitions for them not to drink the scummy
bathwater, but all is still right in our world. After bath everyone has a warm
drink and teeth-brushing, peeing and clothes picking for school ensues. And as
I utter the sentence “ok, last call, bedtime. Everybody get in bed” my kids
transform, before my very eyes, into a couple of odious, weepy, whiny, annoying
imps that I simply cannot stand.
The Girl will start to cry,
doing a weird floppy-legged, bouncing her tush up and down, arm flailing move,
reaching out to me, wailing “Maaaaamaaaaaa” like I’m the last thing she sees as
she falls off a cliff unto certain death. The Boy, not to miss out on any of
the melodrama, starts crying for his binky (that is in his mouth), for me to
stay one more minute, for some juice. I edge out of the door, cheerfully
calling goodnight, like all is normal in my world. Five minutes later the girl starts
flinging herself against the crib sides, choking and sputtering like she’s
getting ready to throw up her milk, the boy wails with an ever mounting
crescendo “Mama, I want Mama”, like he’s been abandoned in an orphanage in
Eastern Europe. I go in, they pathetically ask for water, as if I had ever
refused them a drink, so I wipe noses, clean off tears and distribute drinks. I
leave, everything is quiet, I’m hopeful. I go shower.
The second I step out of
the shower, someone’s calling me, they have to poop, or pee, or have pooped and
I need to change a diaper. I get them settled and leave. They cry, they’re dying
of thirst, they need water. They drink, I leave.
One’s quiet, the other
calls me, he dropped his lovey he can’t sleep. I leave. The other one calls me,
she’s got eight hundred stuffed animals in her bed, she can’t sleep. I put them
back on the shelf, I leave. And then one needs to be covered. The other one is
hot and can’t get out of the covers alone. Then they need water again, but they
also need to pee, or a diaper change.
One more kiss, I’m lonely,
I need a hug. Mama, can I have some waaaaattttteeeeeerrrrr?
Night after night, they are
slowly driving me crazy. How, I ask you, HOW has humanity managed to survive?
Because I tell you, running in there and screaming “shut the fuck up and go to sleep” isn’t working, for me or for them (I’ve tried). I’m starting to
think that parenting is one of those survival of the fittest challenges, and
it’s slowly, slowly killing me.
In fact, as I write this,
it’s 11.48pm, they both finally shut up and went to sleep a couple of hours ago
and the girl just woke up again and
is calling me. She probably needs water. Or a diaper change.
And in the silence of our
darkened and sleeping (for the most part) house all you hear is the thud, thud,
thud of me banging my head against the wall.
