A beautiful growing pain and the kind of fighting you'll miss.

Some days you feel like you're done, spent, counting the minutes until bedtime, or exhausted to the lackadaisical approach of waiting until they fall asleep. Some nights you'll battle at bedtime with a curious kid whose brain is racing endlessly with thoughts about life and the universe, or just trying to cajole you into letting them stay up just a little bit later that make you wonder what your parents did with questions like that. Then you think about how there's no way in hell that your parents went through anything in the stratosphere of the stages of bedtimes you've navigated ranging from infancy with 1 kid, to 2 kids, to 3 kids who range from 10 years, to 8 years, to 5 years. If your parents, like mine, put you to bed in the mid-1980's it probably consisted of tucking you in, giving you a pat on the head, and maybe, if you were lucky, reading 1 of the 5-10 books you had. Now kids have literary collections in their rooms that are closer to the book stacking in the New York Public Library in Ghostbusters, harkening back to the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947.

Bedtimes go through eras. The bassinet next to the bed with one eye open the recliner in their bedroom is one. Then the era of the recliner in their room breaking every rule you read in every baby book about leaving them in a crib and getting whatever sleep you could muster while holding them and rocking them to sleep. This era usually converges with the laying on the floor next to their crib while holding their hand, also likely spitting in the face of any professional advice some book might have on the matter when you're running on fumes and just trying to close your eyes for a few hours. Sometime around then you reach story time status which soon turns into your child's first experience of negotiation. Some nights you might read 2 books, some nights you might read 12, and most of the time you're sleeping right alongside them, getting an awful night's rest that you wouldn't trade for anything.

Soon, you'll have an easier time getting them to bed, but they'll still use some of these tactics to get you to linger around at bedtime. There's a noise outside, they're scared, they can't sleep. They're really just telling you they're more comfortable when you're there in a roundabout way. And that's one of the biggest indirect compliments a young child can give to a parent. In the moment you're never thinking about it that way. You're exhausted, your house is a mess, you want to watch the new episode of Severance. Your nerves are shot because you've been dealing with the death of your own parents by not completely dealing with it and most days the only thing helping you through it is the hustle and bustle of parenthood.

It's a constant struggle, a push and pull; they're testing you and trying to gain any inch they can. The task of trying to give them everything you can while supporting their curiosity and development into independence becomes daunting and often insurmountable. But carrying them to bed after they've fallen asleep on the couch and squeezing them tight because you never know when it might be for the last time is a part of parenting no one told you about. The parts that you'll miss that you already know you'll miss in the moment as they happen. It's a perspective that gains more clarity when you have more than one child because the heartache of your oldest growing through these dependencies still lingers. They get older and we do too, it's a beautiful growing pain, but one we'll carry with us for the rest of our days.

Listening to:

Childish Gambino "Time"

Van Morrison "Dweller on the Threshold" Yes "Time And A Word"

Bob Dylan "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go"

U2 "Running to Stand Still"

#dadonbuswithheadphones #parenting #bedtime #dadblog