Like diapers, leaky boobs and my ability to sit on the toilet alone and without an audience, naps in our household have become a thing of the past. Not for me personally, though; I should state for the record that never in my life have I been a nap-taker; if I lie down while the birds are chirping, I’ll toss and turn for an hour before crashing, then wake up sometime in the far-distant future, somewhere around 2058, I’m pretty sure, with no real desire to ever carry on life as it once was, back in the days of yore when I tumbled off to sleep in the first place.
I digress.
The person I’m referring to – the one for which all naps have ceased – is my wild and exuberant three-year-old daughter. My husband and I deliberated carefully for a couple of weeks over whether or not to instigate this great sea-change, and in the end decided that while giving up our free chunk of midday me-time felt akin to some form of gratuitous corporal punishment, it was ultimately something we needed to sacrifice in order to maintain all semblance of sanity after the sun had gone down, and maybe – just maybe – out of it we’d gain some slivers of an evening to ourselves.
Our daughter, darling and sweet though she is, has always been a miserable sleeper. As the little old church ladies would say, she has other gifts. From the day she was born until somewhere around her second birthday, she nursed like a fiend: always and only at my breast, enveloped in love. There was nothing more in the world I loved than breastfeeding that babe of mine… except maybe sleep. I loved sleep. And I got none of it. Upwards of a dozen times per night, this girl of mine would whimper, fuss, wail and cry until she latched onto my body – and if it wasn’t for the night-weaning I had to instigate to maintain my personal wellbeing, she’d probably still be attached to me like the human boob barnacle she was.
As the years have gone by, she’s gotten better; she finally learned to sleep through the night, to take naps on her own in her crib, and to go to bed without too much of a fight. Every sleep-related milestone we hit felt like we’d scaled Mount Everest. We deserve this, I thought. We worked for this. Now let’s go downstairs, binge-watch Game of Thrones, and eat Haagen Dazs until our tummies hurt and we start feeling our pulses beating out of our necks.
But lately, in her wise old age, it’s started appearing as though she is, in some form, getting too much sleep. What was once 12-14 hours per night plus a two- or three-hour nap during the afternoon began to turn into more like eight hours overnight and three-plus hours during the day. And I might not have cared or even noticed if not for the fact that our evenings started getting swallowed whole by the bedtime process; and by “our” I really mean mine, because my husband is often not able to be home in the evenings; and by “swallowed whole” I really mean something loosely related to World War III.
Because roughly speaking, after dinner, my daughter and I would spend the ensuing three hours bartering, wagering, negotiating, arguing, fighting and pretty much waging war on one another until we both passed out from exhaustion. To say that I hated bedtime, that I dreaded the evenings, would be an understatement.
So we made a change; we cut out naps. And for the first few weeks, it worked like a dream – she was mind-numbingly exhausted all day, which presented challenges of its own, but by sundown she was beat, and would pass out in the instant that her head hit the pillow. I was moonwalking out of her room every night and high-fiving myself all the way downstairs. I got cocky, I guess. Because now? Now God’s sitting in her recliner with a bowl of popcorn watching me like I’m The Desperate Housewives.
The issue, honestly, is our commute home every evening; after I get off work, I swing by to pick her up from child care, and no matter how loudly I blare the radio, how many questions I bombard her with or how vigorously I tap her in the back of the head from my driver’s seat at every stop light, I can’t get her to wake up from these God-awful power naps she keeps sneaking in. So by the time we pull into the driveway at home, she’s sawing logs one minute then swatting me, limbs flying everywhere the next, while she implores me to shut the damn door and let her sleep in the car forever.
So cue the tears, cue the tantrums, cue the “But I don’t want supper! I want lunch!” argument, and cue my patience starting out strong as an ox, my will as sure as the strength of a thousand men, which then dwindles down to the patience, strength and maturity level of a three-year-old who doesn’t understand why she can’t lick on her own fingers dipped in ranch dressing for supper. Suffice it to say it’s kind of a bad time for both of us.
I’m trying hard to find the medium, remembering to extend grace to her and to myself, but wow. It’s hard. I know my daughter came with a manual when she was born, but I can’t find it anywhere – and without it, things get kind of fuzzy now and again. I’m trying, though. And barring any progress, at least I’m writing. It’s important to document these things either for posterity, or maybe just in order to build a manuscript with which I can badger my daughter to go fetch me a beer and some snacks later in life.
Parenthood, am I right? It’s a wild and wondrous thing – I’ll never stop touting the message that it’s absolutely the most bonkers blessing that’s ever landed in my lap. There are moments I love, moments I loathe, and moments so insane I don’t know how I keep my head affixed to my neck and shoulders. But all of it is something I’m grateful for, no matter how many times I climb the walls throughout the course of the day or whether again I’ll ever get to play by my own rules. Sleep be damned, I’m on one roller coaster I won’t hop off of no matter how wild and unruly you swear to me it’s going to be.
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Find Sandy's writing at sandsmama.com, or follow her on Instagram at @sandsmama.