Be Her

I heard you walking around your room in the middle of the night. Your Dad was leaving for work, it was an ungodly hour and I could hear you puttering around your room. Doing what? I have no idea, but you putter around your room every, single night (or morning? do we consider this morning?) from about 4/4:30 - 5/5:30. It makes me crazy.

I feel this out-of-control frustration because just when I think you must be totally exhausted so you’ll surely fall asleep and stay asleep for the whole night…for once…you don’t. It never happens. It feels like it will never happen. This feels like some kind of retribution for our holding a boundary and making you sleep in your own room after two years of bad pandemic sleeping habits. Two years in which you were the only person who slept through the night because you hogged the bed and kicked everyone around you. It’s either you get sleep or I get sleep, but we will never - not ever, not under any single circumstance, ever - will we both sleep at the same time and for the same duration. It’s not in the cards for us, my sleep-mocking child of a sleep-obsessed mother.

I can't fall back asleep unless I know you're sleeping. And much to my chagrin, you do this nighttime circus of noise-making every single night so I have become the woman who cannot sleep.

So last night, around 4-something, when I first heard you, I shouted through the wall, "Go back to sleep! Get back in your bed and go to sleep!" I then proceeded to toss and turn for the next 2.5 hours, and I never fell back to sleep. Instead, I lie there, feeling bad about shouting at you, stewing about work stuff, and willing it to be the end of the day at the end of a loooooong week. I just want time to get my shit together and I want that time to include sleep.

And then you burst into my bedroom.

"I don't feel good, Mama," you say, meekly, as you walk over to my bed and crawl in next to me. Your coughs rattle your whole body.

I put my hand on your face. Your skin is warm to the touch. You rest your head on the empty pillow beside me.

I feel like a jerk. I was shouting at you in the middle of the night and you were probably feeling terrible and trying to get to sleep.

I take your temperature. 101.6. Oof.

"You're staying home today, Sweetpea," I tell you as I pull your little body into my arms.

You smile up at me, “I’m glad you’re my mama. I love you.”

“I’m glad you’re my Sweetpea.”

Loving you is the wildest ride. You drive me absolutely freaking bananas most of the time. You push every button I’ve got, and some I didn’t know I have. You test my patience, refuse to let me sleep and interrupt every spare minute I have. And yet you push me, everyday, to become the person I want to be. I don’t know who she is, but I know you see her.

I keep coming back, because I want to meet her.