I started the go to sleep process at 8:15 tonight. Finally got both kids asleep by 9:15 (they are so off schedule with this whole storm). I got in bed by 10 PM. First, I could not fall asleep. Tried for about 2 hours. Then, I finally did. Shortly after I fell asleep, Anna woke up crying. I had to lie down on her floor with her to get her back to sleep. I don't fit in her toddler bed. I don't want her in my bed. So this is our "compromise."
1:00 AM, back to sleep. 1:15 AM: Mama, I wet the bed again. What in the world? Jonathan never wets the bed. Two nights in a row, very strange. Maybe it's all this rain. Stripping the bed, with the wet sheets, the beloved snowman blanket, the two quilts (maybe I need to have less bedding on the bed for him to pee on) and changing a shivering and soaking wet boy into new jammies. How much pee could his bladder possibly hold? It's insane. Like someone dumped a quart of water on the bed! Glad I never took the plastic case off mattress from his potty-training days.
Then Dave went into a terrible coughing fit. I felt bad for him! He took cough med and sat up for a while to try and stop coughing. Now it's 2:15 AM and Jonathan and I are snuggled up in the chair watching cartoons. I can't even think about sleeping because I feel like the next time I get woken up, I am going to have a FIT!!!! Sometimes when I get woken up for the third or fourth time in one night like this I just lose it, and I start stomping and huffing around and even swearing, I'm ashamed to admit. I really don't have much control over my temper because I am so groggy.
My own mother never acted like this. I never remember her being anything but loving and kind when I woke her up with a wet bed or a bloody nose or a sick tummy or a bad cough or a bad dream. Which was, the way I remember it, almost every single night! Of course, my mother was almost supernaturally patient, cheerful and energetic when I was a kid, so it is not a very fair standard to compare myself to. I can remember waking up and groggily peering down the hall when we lived on base and she would be up scrubbing the terrazo.
Some people wind up in therapy because their mother is not good, and one of the things I struggle with is that I feel like I don't measure up to her in a lot of ways. I know a lot of it was a facade, which did crumble away in the second half of my childhood, but still, my Mom gave me a lot to live up to as a mother. I think we have a tendency to criticize the way our parents did things and think about how we want to do things differently with our own kids. I think people do this whether they had good parents or bad. I used to think this way, until I had my own kids and I realized how difficult, overwhelming and lonely parenthood can be, and that my Mom really did an excellent job, an outstanding job in many ways. I feel like I have been given so much more to work with and I just can't keep it together half as well as her!
Is it too early to start drinking coffee yet? If I had gone to sleep at 8:15 then I would have already gotten six hours of sleep. If I fell back asleep right now, I might hope to get five hours of sleep before Anna wakes up demanding a "bedtime snack (this is what she calls breakfast!)"
Friday, August 22, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment