Life on the Edge

Chicago, IL

The edge of the bed. If you’ve ever spent any time here, you know that the ‘edge’ is not the new middle.  It isn’t edgy. In fact, it’s usually just the floor.

You don’t even realize your peril until you faceplant on your fancy hardwood. You do notice your child slumbering peacefully in the space you recently occupied, with all of your pillows and the covers stolen from you, prior to your ejection.

It’s alarming. It happens just as you start to twitch, just as your book falls on your face. Nobody at 911 cares when you call to say you spent the night with 2 pairs of feet in your breastbone, slept for a total of 40 minutes and snuffed pee for the remainder. They tend to hang up.

This nighttime tragedy happens when you concede to one or more of your kids that they may sleep in your bed. You allow it because you are weak. Not in the sense of moral character, but just because you are too damn lazy to haul them back to their own bed at 3:33 in the morning.

You are rewarded with a foot in your spleen – wherever that is, but it hurts – and then another to your brain. There are only so many you can take. Thus, my loss of memory and the fact that I now just lie quietly on the floor, pretending to be dead in order to avoid more elbows in my eye sockets.

It turns out though, that the floor is a thousand times better than sleeping next to children. You cling out of instinct and because you think you are sleeping but you haven’t since they climbed in. You cling because relinquishing your mattress real estate sets a precedent that can never be recovered. Surrender, is peace, my friends. Take the floor.

Our natural instinct is to fight the good fight. “Move over!” And hang on tight as nobody moves except maybe closer to you, pokey toenails and all. You have to be cautious about reclaiming space, because you might wake them. And then, have to listen to theories about “what would happen if I were a zombie?” According to my son, now at 4 am, if he were a cat zombie he’d probably go under a bed. And if he were a zombie puppy, his sister would pet him a lot.

It’s amusing until he starts explaining where he left off in Minecrap. At which point I go deep under-cover(s) and pretend I’m dead. Again.

As they’ve gotten older, the bed has become smaller and I will often just resign to the couch. It’s a larger amount of space than I would get in my bed and I don’t have to referee the battle over who gets to sleep next to me – an argument I could resolve easily by sleeping between them. HA!

It’s bad enough being body slammed on one side by someone who doesn’t even have the courtesy to wake up when I cry but the mommy sandwich is simply not practical. Now that my kids have entered the phase of not peeing at all during the night, Mommy needs to get up frequently and would prefer to not have to navigate the bed bucket of arms, legs, lovies, and limbs – not to mention, there are times when these bones creak loud enough to wake the dead.

The good thing is, that Elvis the cat hardly takes up any room at all, preferring as he does to curl up around my neck. When the three of us end up slumbering in the family bed I swore I’d never indulge, it’s nice to know someone is respectful of the collective space if not my own personal boundaries.

Ordinarily, I’d agree, there is nothing more sacrosanct than snuggling up to these little warm bodies, even as they attempt to decapitate you with their tiny limbs. But in true survival mode, I cannot abide the loss of my head. And lately, my sleep. So, I’ll just sleep on the floor until they outgrow this phase, or live on their own. A rapidly approaching eventuality in my mind. After all my son can make his own Ramen. 

 

________________________