Role Reversal

Posted on May 28, 2008
Filed Under kids, parenting | 8 Comments

I have taken an eleven hour nap. And you can only imagine how rejuvenated a person who hasn’t really, in any significant or decent capacity, slept in months, can feel after such a slumber.

Last night was inexplicably the night that the toll of cumulative insomnia caught me by the nape of the neck and shook me out flat. By six p.m., I was nodding and bobbing my way through dinner – a routine familiar from years and years as a student who never made it through a history class without her head hitting the desk at least once during an hour’s lesson. After the kids finished their second helping of macaroni and declared themselves through with the pork tenderloin that had been carefully cut into bite sized cubes and remained untouched on one side of the plate, I groggily excused myself, mumbling that my eyes refused to stay open for even an instant longer. I left the two of them and My Better Half to clear the table and do the dishes, I left laundry piled in the basket, I trusted that someone would let the dog out and that the evening would somehow pass without my presence, without my orchestration and command.

I pulled the drapes and donned the most leisurely of leisure pants and curled up in the cocoon of my darkened bedroom. Moments later, G crawled in beside me. She had selected a bedtime story to read while I drifted off to sleep. She read to me from a book of cautionary tales. She started with the title story, Shock-Headed Peter, about a boy who morphs into a ghastly monster for having refused to comb his hair or brush his teeth, for having ignored the most basic of hygene routines. I was, initially, just conscious enough for her to stop and ask me for help sounding out the words “sloven” and “grimed.”

But by the time she began the second tale of Cruel Frederick who was mauled by a dog after kicking and whipping the poor canine, I was too far gone to help her sound out “horrid” and “wicked” and “snatched”. Eventually she gave up asking me to help her with the difficult words as it took far too long for me to snap-to and surely she was aware that her telling of the Story of Augustus Who Would Not Have Soup and thus died of starvation and The Story of Little Suck-Thumb who could not be deterred from sucking his thumb and was thus visited by the Tall Tailor who snipped off the offending fingers with his sewing shears would usually elicit some sort of softened moral explanation. The fact that I was snoring through the The Story of Fidgety Philip and continued to sleep even after Phil was crushed beneath the weight of the dinner table that he upset by failing to sit still at dinner time must have suggested to her that I was deeply, deeply in need of the rest. And so, I imagine, she quietly, proudly turned out the reading light and tip toed from the room having, for the first time in her little life, put her mother to bed.

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