“Why is my curfew nine o’clock?” my eighteen-year-old son asked. “On a weekend. In the summer.”
“Because I need my sleep,” I answered.
When my kids are out at night, I’m restless and sleepless until they come home. By this point in my life I had expected I’d be sleeping like a baby.
Of course, anyone who has ever had their own personal infant recognizes that in terms of accuracy, that phrase ranks right up there with your call is very important to us, we appreciate your honest feedback, and my goal as mayor is to listen to the people.
If the phrase “sleep like a baby” was intended to mean briefly and infrequently, it might be more accurate. Babies are born with no consideration for normal human schedules. In this regard, they’re a lot like telemarketers.
According to the baby psychology books I’d read, the key to getting an infant to sleep through the night quickly was to establish a routine and stick to it. We did just that. By the third night our routine was that the baby woke us every three hours. The psych books hadn’t reckoned on the sheer cussed stubbornness of my son. I was determined that he’d sleep and he was determined that I’d get up.
I compromised and sent my wife to take care of him.
This strategy bought me another couple of days and then she insisted that we start alternating nights. Seemed fair, so one night it was her turn to get up and the next night it wasn’t mine.
At that point – about a week after the baby had come home – I would have done anything for a good night’s sleep. When the baby cried, I’d pretend to be asleep and hope my wife would get up. Sometimes I pretended so hard I pulled a muscle. My wife (who had foolishly believed everything I said about wanting to share in “the child care experience”) didn’t buy the act and showed no compunction about poking me repeatedly until I got up.
I consoled myself with the thought that I’d get more sleep when the baby turned into a toddler.
It didn’t work out that way. While the baby was turning into a toddler, we had another baby. When the new baby woke up at night, he woke the toddler who thought that once he was awake it was time to play.
I consoled myself with the thought that I’d get more sleep when they were older.
For a brief time that was actually true. While they were in kindergarten I managed to get a few decent nights’ sleep. Then the school projects started. My kids seem to have some sort or internal mental project alarm which is set to go off at approximately nine-fifteen.
“Daddy,” one of them said during his first-grade year. “I have to have twelve different kinds of leaves for school tomorrow.”
At that instant I was settling in for an intellectually-stimulating hour of TV viewing (Springer runs late on the local station) and I was not prepared to go on a leaf hunt. What kind of psychotic assigns kids to collect leaves anyway?
“We’ll find some tomorrow,” I said.
“No time,” my son replied. “Gotta have ‘em first thing.”
So I put on my overcoat, grabbed a flashlight and took my child out into the cold October evening looking for leaves. Pickings in our mostly suburban neighborhood were slim. I think my son deserved a better grade, but how was I to know that the teacher wouldn’t count the spare leaf from the kitchen table? In my mind my son was showing initiative and imagination. Maybe it had something to do with the broken toe she suffered when he dropped it on her foot.
I’d like to report that the projects got easier as they got older. I’d like to, but that would be a lie.
Over the years we’ve built museum-quality dioramas, coached the kids through reports on obscure eras in Mesopotamian history, rehearsed songs, dances and poems for school performances, and held all-night study sessions about multiplication tables, state capitols, and the major exports of Antarctica. To be honest I don’t remember my schooling being that difficult, but maybe that’s because my parents were helping me.
Being short of sleep was worth it, though, because my kids were getting an education. And I consoled myself with the thought that I’d get more sleep when they were older.
Once again, I was wrong.
Now that the kids are in high school, they don’t need as much coaching on the homework. Sink or swim they want to do it on their own. Which is the problem. They want to do everything on their own. They drive. They have dates. They have jobs. And they’re frequently out late at night.
So I sit up, worried, imagining the worst. What if they have a flat tire and the cell phone died and they’re frantically trying to call for help while a maniac with a hook for hand is sneaking up on them? What if the tire blew out and they slid into a ditch…filled with alligators and piranha fish? What if a comet turned the population into zombies and my children are desperately trying to fight off an attack by the undead?
Part of the problem is that while I’m waiting up for them, I watch whatever happens to be on TV and more often than not that happens to be bad horror films. If ever I catch a Jane Austen marathon I’ll probably get paranoid that the boys are held up by the obnoxious Lady Catherine de Bourg.
So I wait and worry until they come home. Then I shuffle off to bed consoling myself with the thought that I’ll get more sleep after they go to college.
 
