Nightmares, Irritating Comments, Strange Men in My Yard

At 12:45 last night/this morning, Carla SCREAMED my name (well, she screamed “Mommy” which is pretty close to a name) and I leapt out of bed from a deep sleep, heart flinging itself out of my chest, trying to get away from what was certainly a murderer. And it might as well have been: Carla was cowering in the bathroom and refused to go back into her bedroom without me. She’d had a nightmare. She couldn’t remember what it was about, but the terror had followed her outside the cocoon of sleep. Poor kiddo. I sent my husband in to lie down with her but she kicked him out for snoring. So I went in to lie with her until she fell asleep. Pretty normal parenting fare.

But then she couldn’t get back to sleep. She wanted the lights on. No. She wanted to watch videos. No. She wanted to sleep with her bunny and bear. No (both in the laundry after an earlier wake up incident).  She would settle for her fox, but I couldn’t find it and I refused to turn on the lights. Eventually I located it under the bed.

She was too hot. She wanted to watch just one little video please Mommy just one. No.

She was Wide Awake.

I contemplated starting the day at two a.m. I quickly shoved that idea aside. I told Carla firmly but kindly that it was time for bed, she needed to lie down and close her eyes and try to sleep.

“I’m not sleepy, Mommy.”

CHILD. How?!?!?!

I scratched her back. I got her water. I sang her every song in my Lullaby-and-Adjacent repertoire. I even googled some lullabies whose tunes I knew but whose words I was unsure of. Then I googled some soothing music to play on my phone. (FYI – a large number of the “lullabies for babies” options on You Tube are the same collection of notes played in an infinite loop. Very boring.

“This is boring, Mommy,” Carla said.

“I know, that’s the point,” I told her.)

The repetition of the notes started digging deep ruts through my brain, so I kept stopping them and searching for new ones. I just wanted a playlist of soothing lullabies! Did I search for “playlist of soothing lullabies”? No. Eventually, I settled on a track that combined a burbling brook with some soft piano music. Finally – FINALLY – at 3:15 a.m. in the morning, Carla fell back to sleep. I went back to bed and of course couldn’t sleep. So I read a few entries in Swistle’s archives – very soothing – until I fell asleep. Then Carla woke me up promptly at 6:18 a.m. in the morning so I am very tired.

 

What a restful night. (I made the executive decision to hand Carla my phone at 6:18 so she watched a couple episodes of Berenstain Bears while I slept for another hour.)

* * *

At camp drop off, I ran into someone who I see pretty frequently. I wouldn’t exactly call her a friend, for reasons that will soon be clear. Sure enough, she irritated the hell right out of me, right away.

“Oh, wow, you look tired!” she said.

Yes. Yes, I do look tired. And I have good cause for it. But for the love of Brie and crackers, WHY would you ever say such a thing to someone else? It’s not the first time she’s uttered that exact phrase to me (although it’s been a while, for some reason).

This person has a habit of making comments about my appearance or general mien, and it’s very off-putting, and I am not close enough to her to have a heart-to-heart about why she should STOP IMMEDIATELY.

“Your face is SO red! Were you just exercising?”

No, no I wasn’t. But thanks for making me self-conscious about my face.

“You look like you’ve lost weight.”

Is that any of your business? Or anyone’s business? Why are you monitoring my weight?

“You look so refreshed! Were you napping?”

What…? Do I really look like I have time to nap?

Or, my recent favorite: “You seem pretty hassled.”

What? What does that even mean? Does it mean that I seem flustered and out of sorts and frustrated? Perhaps I am. Because if you MUST KNOW my child was having a Very Rough Day and just before you got in my face I had to put her on time out not once but twice and we are late for The Thing We Are All At and I am feeling hot and frazzled and a little crazed right now and I am at This Thing and so I am trying to put on a pleasant and capable and not on the edge of losing my mind face for the public while I try to regain my grip. So yes, I AM HASSLED. But do you really think COMMENTING on it is going to help? If you are actually concerned about my state of mind, aren’t there kind, friendly, gentle ways to ASK about it, rather than pointing out that I am not hiding my true feelings very well?

PANT, PANT.

I get that maybe she thinks she is being… friendly? Or… that she is trying to be A Good Friend, and thinks saying these kinds of things is an invitation for me to unload. But it does NOT come across that way. Am I being too sensitive? Too prickly? I just… don’t comment on people that way! I mean, I might say I like your shoes or your nail polish or your lipstick or whatever… but the closest I’ve come to saying anything about anyone’s actual appearance is something like, “You look so great!”

Maybe there are some people who wouldn’t mind this woman’s comments. Maybe some people would appreciate how observant she is about Every Single Aspect of their appearance and attitude. How in tune she is with their… whatever.

I am not one of those people. Well-intentioned though they may be, I find her comments to be invasive and rude. But again, we’re not close enough for me to tell her to knock it off. So I have started responding with single-word answers and perplexed looks in hopes of shutting down the conversation.

“Your face is SO red! Were you just exercising?” –> “Nope.” * confused look *

“You look like you’ve lost weight.” –> “Oh?” * bland smile, subject change *

“You look so refreshed! Were you napping?” –> “Nope.” * perplexed look *

“You seem pretty hassled.” –> “I don’t know what that means.” * blank face * (To this one, though, she responded, “I’m going to take that as a yes.” STEAM IS ESCPAING FROM MY EYE AND NOSE HOLES.)

Exhausting. But it is not my job to teach another person how to properly interact with other humans. Good luck to her.

* * *

I was sitting in my kitchen after exercising this morning, in my sports bra, gulping water and trying to catch my breath after my strenuous twenty-minute exercise video and gazing aimlessly out into the backyard through the sliding glass doors, when a STRANGE MAN waltzed across my lawn. You understand he didn’t really waltz, per se. But he was in my yard, moving in a manner that implied he’d been invited. He had NOT.

He was wearing a bright yellow vest and was carrying some sort of tree-trimming type tool. I shrank away from the doors, hideously embarrassed to be in my BRA and NO SHIRT, and then watched from a distance as he prowled around my yard and then walked back around the house to the front yard. There he joined a few other young men, all in the same clothing, and they tromped across my neighbor’s yard and down the block.

I remember vaguely getting some sort of notice that some sort of workers might be in our area. But I don’t remember who they were or what they were supposed to be doing. And I CERTAINLY don’t remember that they were going to be in my BACK YARD, which seems a whole different kind of deal than doing whatever it is they were doing (inspecting trees/power lines? looking for alligators? scouting potential gold mines?) in people’s FRONT yards.

UGH. Seems like the least a person could do is knock on the door and ASK if they could peruse your back yard, right? Not that I would have answered the door – everyone knows that murderers always knock first and wear bright yellow vests to divert attention away from their murderousness – but STILL. There’s the PRINCIPLE to think about!

* * *

Tomorrow is a holiday but I am not feeling very festive. I love my country but so much about it makes me so sad and hopeless these days. And it is unbearably hot and steamy here. And I hate fireworks because they keep my child awake and make me worry about gunfire and fire-fire.

Okay, okay. My crankiness is making ME weary.

Let’s try to think of the positives: My in laws are coming over and my husband is off work and Carla doesn’t have camp. We will go to a parade in the morning. I bought some pretty red, white, and blue flowers. I have good food planned for us to eat. Also margaritas.

Well, crud. My attempt at brightsiding is not working, because now I am reminded that my grill is on the fritz (is that the right phrase? looks weird but I am on four hours’ sleep so a lot of things look weird) so I am going to have to cook hot dogs and ribs in my OVEN tomorrow. Yes, yes, I know. This is not the worst thing to happen to a person by any sort of measure. And I am deeply grateful to have both an oven and ribs/hot dogs. AND YET. I AM CRANKY.

Feeling grateful for the things I DO have does not mean I have to be HAPPY about the things that are BROKEN. (That last sentence seems perfectly applicable to the state of our country, too, doesn’t it?)

Blueberry cake. We will also have blueberry cake. There. I ended on a high note.

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Saturday Loafing; The Ongoing Quest for Good Sleep

It is Saturday and I am sitting on the couch with my daughter. We are watching Frozen, after watching many hours of nauseating Nick Jr. shows on demand.

For dinner, she has eaten a bowl of broccoli with cheese, while a plate of chicken dinosaurs and Dr. Praeger’s dinosaur-shaped yam patties languish untouched on her plate; I have eaten a bowl of edamame and three Yam Dinosaurs.

Last night’s clean dishes are still in the dishwasher; today’s lunch and breakfast dishes remain unscrubbed in the sink. My child is not wearing pants.

We did manage to go to swimming lessons this morning, so one of us got some exercise.

We also accomplished a two-hour nap: good for her, and, on a reducing-the-sleep-debt level, for me as well (although naps always make me feel a) wasteful and b) headachy.).

I feel quite guilty at wasting a beautiful, sunny Saturday inside in front of the idiot box. Especially because my poor husband is on call and has been at the hospital for going on 14 hours already. Saving lives and improving people’s quality of life and such. While I can’t even screw up the energy to go for a walk around the block.

Whatevs.

We are in the midst of A Poor Sleep Phase of life, which is not fun. It’s never fun, FYI. Carla is having a very hard time getting to sleep at night. We’ve tried cry it out. We’ve tried moving the bedtime UP and moving it BACK. We’ve tried allowing her to play in her room. We’ve tried sleeping with her. It’s all resulted in roughly the same thing, which is that she falls asleep by 10:15 or so each night. On average. Which means that on the best nights it’s about nine and on the worst nights it’s about 11:30.

We also briefly tried eliminating her nap, in hopes that her sleep needs would increase at night, but that tactic had its own issues: 1.) We can only truly eliminate it on the weekends; her daycare won’t/can’t. So the inconsistency was getting inconsistent results. 2.) I complained about the sleep issue to her pediatrician, and when I told him what we were trying to correct it, looked at me with mild alarm and said, “If she’s still napping, DON’T cut the nap.”

Here is where I feel compelled to go into Great Detail about all the other methods we’ve tried. But I’m too tired and you probably don’t care. Whatever. Sleep issues are a dime a dozen, and what works or doesn’t work for one person may or may not work for another person. This IS a phase that will end EVENTUALLY. It will likely be replaced, at some point, by something worse.

My mother-in-law said cheeringly today that she once read sleep issues of this sort can indicate high intelligence in a child. That sounds right up there with “morning sickness is often an indication of a healthy pregnancy” and “a steep drop in the stock market is a good opportunity to expand your portfolio” and “rain on your wedding day means good luck for your marriage.” They may be true or they may be gentle padding for a rough time, but they don’t make enduring the present unpleasantness less pleasant.

I was comforted for a while that Carla’s current issue has only been affecting the BEGINNING of sleep. Once she falls asleep, she sleeps straight through until seven the next morning. But then – after falling asleep at 11:00 last night – she woke up at about 2:30, bright and ready to play, and didn’t fall back to sleep until 4:17. Ask my eye bags and hamper of half-folded laundry how I know the exact duration of her wakefulness. This reminds me that a few weeks? months? ago, Carla was waking up at 3:00 or 4:00 many mornings and falling back to sleep around six.

And that reminder reminds me that one of the things that’s making this CURRENT issue difficult is that I keep wailing, “But Carla used to be SUCH a Good Sleeper!”

But I don’t know if that’s really TRUE. There was a long period of time where she REFUSED to go to sleep without nursing. And then, when she gave up nursing, she would only go to sleep after a bottle. I seem to recall that the time after she turned two – when we cut her off the bottle cold turkey – was particularly rough in terms of Getting to Sleep. Then, in the past six or eight months, there was a time when she would only fall asleep in OUR bed. And there was another stretch when she woke up in the middle of the night and would only go back to sleep in our bed (which means that she is the only one of the three of us who sleeps; she’s a wiggler and a kicker). If you look at all of those examples – blurry and seen through droopy, half-awake eyes and a fuzzy, sleep-deprived brain – it seems like she’s been in a Poor Sleep Phase more often than not.

Probably it is most accurate to say that there have been Intermittent Periods of Good Sleep. Lasting a few blissful weeks or months. But long enough to give us all a taste of what that feels like. So when the next Poor Sleep phase pops up, it seems especially harsh and hard to deal with.

My mother pointed out that we all know going in that sleep is not something parents have in abundance. The way she said it made it seem matter of fact and also like it would be true for the ENTIRETY of the parent/child relationship. And I’m too tired today to recognize whether what I feel about that concept is resignation or horror.

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