I mean seriously? What is it about children that then seem to never, and I mean NEVER feel the need to sleep when it is dark outside? I mean sure they are good at sleeping randomly in the middle of the afternoon or on car rides, not when you are planning on them sleeping though, but they seem to have the ability to take a nap whenever.

But at night, when you want to sleep that seems to be a completely different thing. And one they can’t seem to manage. I have four kids and two of them have been good sleepers since infancy and two of them, not so much.

Right now (and I am not trying to make any changes because we are in the middle of moving) my girls all go up to bed at the same time at night, usually around 8:30. We don’t do nightly baths, we don’t necessarily read bed time stories (though we have been reading Harry Potter aloud for a while now we are still 150 pages away from finishing the Order of the Phoenix) we just say good night and send them upstairs. Yes it then takes them half an hour to brush their teeth and do whatever else they have decided they need to do before going to bed, and some nights we have to get involved and remind them.

And some nights they come back down the stairs multiple times, though in the last few nights it has only been once or twice. But they still need to come down at least once.

My almost 12 year old is dealing with the stress of home-buying by starting out the night in her bed and then moving to a nest she has made on the floor at the bottom of our bed around about 1 am in the morning. Most of the time my husband and I sleep through it and apparently she does as well, because she often seems confused as to how she got there the next morning.

My youngest likes to stall the longest about actually getting into her bed, though most of the time she seems to fall asleep reasonably quickly, but she most certainly likes to dictate the stories they tell each other, or the songs they sing or whatever the fuck else they do before actually surrendering to sleep.

My middle two daughters are sleeping in more lately. Which is fine since we are homeschoolers I really don’t care that much. It only becomes problematic if my eldest thinks we should read Harry Potter at breakfast and I refuse to read it if not everyone is up. I also refuse to allow her to wake her sisters up.

I know all of this is going to change soon. We are going to move from a 3 bedroom house to a four bedroom house with dedicated office space for me to be in the morning while they are still probably sleeping. They will have more space in the two bedrooms they get, and there is always an adjustment period while everything finishes getting moved in and we finish unpacking. Since we have a full basement I am hoping most of the boxes can go in the basement and then that way we don’t feel like all of the new house is in chaos as we unpack one box at a time and put things away.

I am also deluding myself that this will mean that I will be able to sort and put away the diaspora that has happened after living 4 years in this house and that I will be able to put like with like more easily. That and 12 closets should help a lot 🙂

Yesterday morning I started nodding off while waiting for my computer to do a massive update. I had already gone on a 2 mile walk in the brisk morning air but I was more than ready to shut my eyes for a little while. This may be because my coping mechanism in times of stress is to sleep as much as I can when I can’t do anything else. Or it could just be I am a mother of four children one of which moves into our bedroom every night which is bound to be disturbing my sleep on some level.

However my kids kept coming to talk to me about this that or the other thing so finally I had to give up on the whole being able to doze any more. I envy old people who can just drift off and then wake back up again, over and over, as a mother that sounds like a luxurious vacation to me.

To just have a day of dozing. I don’t think it will happen in the next decade, because heaven forbid my kids manage to feed themselves for a few hours, but it is nice to dream about, and hope for.

Of course by that time my sleep will have been disrupted for so long I won’t actually know what it looks like to have a normal sleep pattern again. And that will be that.

But maybe I should just try and sneak in a bit more sleep in this time of stress. I often feel like that adage of sleep when the baby sleeps, while helpful and unhelpful (because occasionally you want to have a few waking moments without the baby) should be true even when your babies are long and full of elbows and knees and no longer babies. You should sleep when they sleep.

We should declare days off to just be lie in your bed and doze days, you can read a book or color in your coloring book but let your dad and I get some sleep. We do carve out mornings and afternoons like this. It usually only happens because we threaten to be having sex, which is true sometimes but more often than not we are simply catching up on sleep, because that is actually what we need more sometimes.

But seriously why the fuck won’t kids just go to sleep?

Going and coming, we are like tides in the lives of our children. We are always either coming or going because when we are actually there, when we are staying with them we just become those pieces of things taken for granted, that safety, that security that everything will be fine because my mother is here.

It is only when we have to leave, when we have to have a few minutes of time to ourselves, or go and work at or job or any other reason that suddenly they realize how much they need us, because now we are gone. That firm foundation that they are attached to because they grew inside of us or because we have become their living breathing security blanket, because we are their everything and often they can not really see us as a separate from them. When we go it is like a major earthquake in their lives.

The ground beneath their feet shift. Even if this happens all the time at scheduled intervals. Even if we have warned them ahead of time. Even if they are staying with family or friends or something they really truly enjoy, we are still leaving them in their minds. Every single time.

I have been the full time working parent and I have been the default stay at home what do you mean you would ever leave me parent.

I have been both of those things and honestly they both have lovely shit sandwiches to eat. I don’t think either is better than the other, they all hurt when you need to walk away when you are going.

And the coming, when you come back from being away, whether it was for half an hour or 3 days, there is always much that needs to be done. Hugs and kisses, lots of talking and snuggling. Or if you have a preteen or teenager lots of ignoring ans silent treatment while they let yo know that they didn’t appreciate you were gone by ignoring you when you come back.

Meanwhile you might need to reconnect with your partner. And if you are a single mom there is probably at least a caretaker you need to check in with. Or they may be so excited to leave that it feels a bit like bringing eh baby home from the hospital and now suddenly you are abandon and alone with this child(ren).

And it can feel like it takes a while for your kids to settle back in, to trust that you are staying home (and maybe you aren’t able to stay at home for a while, maybe you do have work the next day or another reason to be away at night or on a weekend) so much longer than you think it will take.

They become clingy or grumpy or just turn up every time you turn around and need your attention. It can make the your transition back to daily life a little harder than you were expecting. Especially if you are tired as traveling often makes one more tired than we expect no matter how many times we do it.

But from your kid’s perspective it is all about them, because that is what they need to be like to insure their survival to adulthood. And you just left them even if it was only to run to the grocery store for 30 minutes, you just abandoned them.

They are not impressed, this is not something they gave their approval of, even if they didn’t want to go and do the thing you needed to do anyway (and honestly I think they probably would rather come and hang with you and drive you crazy because what they find that you are doing is boring RATHER than being left at home or away from you. Unless you can schedule a wonderful play date with their best friend, but even then they may not be that happy for you to go or just annoyed that you came back and are ending their play date.

But this is the reality of life. We for our sanity and ease and because sometimes we do not have any other choice, need to go and be away from our kids. And then we need to come back. This dance of comings and goings, we dance it with each child. We dance it as a family.

It can be intricate and we can feel like we never learned the steps, but the dance is going to happen whether we want it to or not and whether we feel confident in our steps. At the end of the day we need to find ways to acknowledge how we all feel and make space for those feelings and then come back together to all feel safer and closer and safer.