How important is sleep for a mom? Just ask my crying daughter
Aug 26, 2010 Kids
I think this past week may have been my worst week of sleep ever. I’m talking in my whole life, excepting of course the months when I had newborns (there isn’t even a word for that kind of chronic exhaustion). In the past four nights I went to bed once at 4am, twice at 2, and once at midnight, and was awake around six each day. This would have been salvageable if I’d been able to just get the kids to school or camp and then go back to sleep, but this is a weird week.
Jake is going to a week of science camp that’s an hour away from us, and it’s only a half day (9-12). So, it makes absolutely no sense to drive out there, drop him off, drive home, and leave again in an hour. Instead, Fiona and I have been hanging out on Long Island and having some fun mommy-daughter time (pedicures, the mall, lunches, tennis, and one morning spent in the car that we’ll just skip over). That part’s been great, but by the time we all get home at one I’ve been absolutely exhausted. It doesn’t matter what I tell them, what I bribe them with, how much I yell or beg, they haven’t let me nap for more than an hour a day. So I’ve been exhausted, and digging myself in deeper with every late bedtime.
It all came to a head this evening. I was up on the third floor folding laundry and the kids were watching TV on the first floor. It was just about bedtime. There had been some stupid fighting at dinner, but other than that it had been a good day all around. Then I heard the screaming: blood-curdling screeches from Fiona that traveled up the stairs and in the windows on both sides of the house. I called on the intercom phone and yelled for Fiona to get upstairs.
I was tired. She was tired. They’d been fighting over the remote. She just needed to go to bed. But she felt the need to try to explain to me, over and over, why she was screaming (it was all Jake’s fault, of course, in her mind). And every time she tried to explain I tried to drill into her head that it just didn’t matter. That screaming was not the answer and not OK. We were both being incredibly stubborn and one of us needed to just back off, which is what I’m always telling them when they’re fighting. Someone just needed to be the hero and say “Fine. Let’s agree to disagree.” But being completely sleep-deprived I was unable to see it. I was completely unable to recognize that I just needed to give her a hug, tell her that we were both tired and tomorrow will be another day. That’s all I needed to do. So simple.
And yet I couldn’t. She kept making excuses for her behavior and I kept pushing back. I was on automatic. And eventually she was in tears and I was near my breaking point.
Sometimes I think I pride myself in my weird sleeping habits. I’m way more creative late at night, when the house is quiet and phones aren’t ringing and emails aren’t flying in every few minutes. And gee, look how busy I am. I’m so important to be up and tweeting in the middle of the night when all the lazy people are in bed. Wow, she’s so busy, when does she sleep?
I stay up until I get shit done. But at what cost? I know from experience that what I gain from plowing through work at 2am I lose again by having a disorganized day when I wake up after 4 hours of sleep. Even when I am free to nap, it’s just not the same as seven or eight solid hours. I know this. But I can never see it when I’m tired.
I think the answer may be tattooing some reminders on my arm, like in Memento. Something like “You’re an ineffective parent when you’re exhausted.” Or maybe more to the point: “Get more sleep or your children will grow up to be assholes who also hate you.”
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Tags: exhaustion, sleep
Nine years ago today my life changed forever
Jul 30, 2010 Kids
I’ve been staring at that terrible headline trying to come up with something less clichéd, maybe a little funny or snarky. But I can’t come up with anything more honest. Today is my oldest child’s birthday (the very minute this posted, actually). And while I don’t love him any more than I love his little sister, he’s the one who made me a mom. He’s the one who terrified me, the one I stumbled with and had absolutely no clue with. He’s the one who helped me prove that you can flail around for the first few years trying to figure out who you are as a mom and come out just fine on the other side.
Being a mom is hard. It’s especially hard for someone as lazy as I am. Kids add a lot of work: more laundry, more dishes, shuttling from place to place, overseeing homework, disciplining, and as I found out with a boy, a lot of time monitoring personal hygiene (seriously, just about any mom will tell you: boys are gross and don’t seem to care). And what they take away has even more of an impact: free time, sleep, money, peace of mind. A grape is no longer a grape, it’s the giant round monster that will try to kill your child. Stairs are terrifying and cars are death traps. Bathrooms are slippery and hard and designed to crack your child’s skull open.
But even more than the specific physical challenges to keeping a child alive, the world suddenly becomes a different place, more sinister. And Jake’s timing made this exponentially worse. On September 11th, 2001 Jake was five weeks old. I was hormonal and just beginning to settle into being a mom when everything changed. I sat on my couch watching TV and holding Jake, knowing that his diaper was completely dirty, but I was paralyzed. I was waiting for my husband to call from his job near the World Trade Center. 
Hours later, even after I knew he was OK, I still couldn’t get off of the couch and take care of my child. I couldn’t help thinking that having him was a big mistake, that the world was just too evil a place for someone so tiny and helpless.
And of course I eventually got off of the couch and that feeling faded. We got on an airplane a couple months later and it didn’t crash and the world seemed OK. But then Jake got older and the world got scary again. It’s easy to read the news and convince yourself that around every corner is a child killer, or a kidnapper, or a pervert. Trucks are waiting for him to cross the street without looking and every innocent piece of Halloween candy is filled with poison. But you push that to the back of your head and let your children explore and grow and learn because frankly, if you don’t, they’ll never move out and you’ll have to invite Dr. Phil’s son over to film you when your child is 35 and still living at home.
That’s another thing that confounds me. I love my children dearly, and try to enjoy my time with them, but I’m always conscious of the fact that the ultimate goal is to get rid of them. That I can measure my success not by how much they need me, but how little they need me. I’m working hard every day to put myself out of a job. The ultimate reward for having them will be when they’re on their own. It’s a strange cycle we’ve all gotten ourselves into.
And then there’s the ultimate betrayal, the fact that just when you’re hitting your stride as a mom, when you’ve managed to keep a child alive for a respectable amount of time, they start to hate you. Everything you do is wrong and stupid. You’re old, uncool, and don’t know anything.
So if kids are dirty, and expensive, and exhausting, and maddening, and scary, why do we do it? I mean, fool me once, sure. But why do so many of us go ahead and have a second kid, or more? Have our brain cells become so deadened at that point by lack of sleep and a diet of Goldfish crackers that we just don’t know what we’re doing?
No. We know exactly what we’re doing. Because even though day-to-day life suffers when you’ve got kids, overall it becomes so much richer. I am amazed everyday at how sweet my son is, how he makes me laugh, how he hugs his sister when he thinks nobody’s looking. How he loves math and music, and is fearless on his skateboard. How he rolls his eyes and says “Oh, mother!” when I get mushy with him. How he hugs me so hard I think my bones are going to break. That’s what’s in it for me.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and Momtourage.
Bargaining with an eight-year-old
Jul 29, 2010 Kids
I try not to say no to my kids unless there’s a good reason. Unfortunately for them, a good reason can be anything from “We can’t afford it” to “You don’t need it” to “Leave me alone I’m taking a nap.” But I try not to be capricious about these things. If it makes sense, whenever possible I say yes.
Jake’s birthday is tomorrow (how the hell do I have an almost-nine-year-old?), and with about 20 kids and counselors in his camp group I told him yesterday that I’d bring in two-dozen yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting. That’s his favorite combination. Instead of my preferred reply, “You’re awesome Mommy!” he said “But what about all of the kids who like chocolate cupcakes?” I told him OK, we’ll do chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting. “No, some of them will want yellow cupcakes!” Sigh.
I explained to him that one box of cake mix makes 24 cupcakes, so he had to choose: all yellow, or all chocolate. And also that anybody who complains about the flavor of free birthday cupcakes should just shut up (I think I said it nicer than that). He didn’t want to choose, and a very pleasant car ride turned ugly fast. He got incredibly snotty, told me I didn’t love him, and said that if I didn’t want to make both kinds then he didn’t want to bring in cupcakes at all. I calmly said fine, his choice.
I don’t reward my kids in any way when they act like that. I waited for him to calm down, and asked if he had anything to say to me. He teared up a little and gave me a huge hug and told me he was sorry, so I offered him a compromise: he wanted a yellow cake with chocolate frosting for his party. I told him that if I could make one layer of that cake chocolate, he could have two kinds of cupcakes. He said he wanted to think about it. Such weighty decisions on his head!
A couple hours later my little Hamlet came to me and told me – rather sadly – that it was a deal. And he thanked me for making the cupcakes and the cake. The sadness and the un-prompted thank you made me pause for a sec. It’s his birthday, should I just do it the way he wants, for that one day?
I don’t know what I’m doing half the time, but I do know that I don’t want my kids to take me for granted. Would baking an extra box of cupcakes make that happen? Maybe not. But I’d rather they not grow up with the sense that they get whatever they ask for. They get way more toys and video games than we would ever buy them because of my job, so saying no to material things just doesn’t come up as much as it used to. But I want them to know how much time it takes me to do things for them, to keep them in clean clothes (most of the time anyway), and keep the house stocked with food, and take care of the logistics that come with two kids and a husband and a house. I want them to value other people’s time.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and Momtourage.
Tags: birhtday cake, Parenting
