Nocturnal Whack-a-Mole and Anna Nicole
Every day at 3:30 am without fail, Buddha wakes to be nursed. Recently, she has decided that the time period that follows is playtime. No amount of swaddling, rocking or grotesquely mangled renditions of old Suzanne Vega songs will quell the thrill she gets from my zombie-like company. El has also usually been up for the majority of the night with anything ranging from night terrors to breastmilk withdrawal. All night long is like a trip to Chuck E. Cheese, with one kid up, then the other, then back to where we started all over again, playing a nocturnal game of whack-a-mole. At 4:45 am, I know my mother will be awake on the east coast and so I have taken to calling her, much to her delight. Her typical greeting is "oh, honey, I'm so sorry. It's so hard when they're little." She knows; they were little five times for her. Her own mother died when she was 16 and it occurred to me during one of last week's calls that she never had someone to call at 4 in the morning when her kids would not sleep.She informed me also that my father did not seem to be responding as well lately to his Parkinson's medication. This news, combined with general reflections on my parents' impending mortality, sent me into a tailspin. Hobbledog & Co. were due for a visit that evening and by the time they arrived I was a blubbering exhausted drunken loony train wreck. With her usual aplomb, Hobbledog took me in hand and managed to get me back to a reasonably acceptable level of chilledoutness, reminding me how little I sleep, not that I needed reminding, and some other words of comfort reminiscent of my mother's trademark "it's so hard when they're little".
During our most recent early morning chat, I told my mom the odd news that Anna Nicole Smith's son had died. I expected her to say something to the effect of "how strange!" but instead she gave the quite distressed-sounding reply of "that's TERRIBLE!" I expected my mom to feel worse for the son than for Anna Nicole, given the fact that she is a blubbering drunken loony train wreck . . . er . . . oh wait, that's me. But she said simply "of course it's terrible! She's a mother!"
And as I reluctantly allowed myself to feel sympathy for this blubbering drun . . . er . . . fairly distasteful woman, it occurred to me: it's not so hard when they're little--it's just so hard. Hard when they are little, big, medium, or your very own parents.
Surely the fact that my current deeply personal revelations about parenting are directly linked to a reality television star are obvious evidence of my level of sleep deprivation. Or maybe it really is just so hard when they are little.
posted by tumpover @ 2:06 PM
5 Comments:
"it's not so hard when they're little--it's just so hard. Hard when they are little, big, medium, or your very own parents."
Afuckingmen, mama. So nice to hear your voice. We miss you. :)
Kim
Tears in my eyes. So true.
Thanks, Kierstin! I miss you, too!
Stella
I miss your voice, mama. Give me a call anytime. We're usually up around 6:30.
Amber
we wub you.
wow. i so remember them being hard. and little. now mine are relatively soft. but also mostly hard. until you lose your shit and become scary hydra mommy with a spinning, multi directional head (tm)...then, as you lunge for one of them (the one who just clocked you with a butter dish) and on the way, slip in some of the other one's spilled applesauce and suddenly you've got nothing but demolition of all living things on your mind...well, then you have this moment where your head is like a mylar balloon filled with helium, loosed from the grip of time, space and your body. it's in that strangely quiet moment that you teeter in between mother and destroyer that you realize their smallness, their frailty and how absolutely insane one can go before snapping back to the reality of using our gentle hands, inside voices and counting backward from ten, over and over and over again.
not that i've ever done that or anything.
your friend,
babaloni yoni
ps. i think we should meet at sams again someday.
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