Kids on the coast

by Aleney de Winte

Having long had a dysfunctional relationship with slumber, broken sleep isn’t new to me. So, though I was warned that motherhood would be anything but somniferous, I thought I’d manage just fine when night feeds and a crying baby at 2am became my reality.

In fact, I was lucky to have had previous experience in the world of the perpetually awake, because my son delighted in maternal tête­a-têtes during the wee dark hours for a year, by which time even a seasoned insomniac like myself started to crave sleep. When the circles under my eyes turned from purple to black, I stoically accepted the fact that he wouldn’t sleep through until he was 34.

Until, one morning I awoke feeling oddly refreshed and terrified, and rushed to my baby’s side where, like any normal paranoid mother, poked him repeatedly to make sure he was breathing. He was asleep (or had been). He’d slept through! On this great day, there was much rejoicing and the people danced and feasted and all was right with the world. Yea, verily.

Night after night, sleep and I snuggled up tight...until someone came between us; someone with curly hair, blue eyes, and four teeth. At first their trysts were brief but soon they were spending whole nights together. My diaper-clad despot was ready to go to war to ensure sleep and I were through.

Though I can normally cope with broken sleep, I must clarify. There’s the broken sleep of the occasional insomniac and there’s the broken sleep of the mother of a despotic devil boy. Sleep so broken that it has been smashed to pieces, set fire to and buried, before having its grave danced merrily upon.

Using all my skills of diplomacy, I carefully explained to my son that he was contravening human rights laws as sleep deprivation is defined as torture under UN conventions and figured I could begin rebuilding my fractured relationship with sleep. I knew that it might take time for us to reach those former giddy heights — but I believed that sleep and I were meant to be.

Sadly, my sleep-stealing sadist of a son disagreed. I tried everything, even replacing his bedtime reading of ‘Hairy MacLary’ with ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, to no avail. Last night he cranked up his war on slumber. After being woken for the seventh time I lay in wait for him to start pulling out my fingernails with pliers and pondered whether, if apprehended, he’d be tried at The Hague and if they’d need me to be a witness for the prosecution. At 4am I’d have happily testified.

Now, bleary-eyed, I watch as my angel-faced oppressor plays with his Little People, a picture of innocence. But I’m on to my mini-Machiavelli as he toys with their little plastic lives... popping this one in a helicopter and another in a car and the one that looks like a plastic sleeping mummy on the plastic railway tracks — before gleefully mowing her down with a bright red train.

All I can do is wait for a celebrity activist to start a campaign to save me from my tiny tormentor. I pray it won’t be Sting (though his soporific droning could put us both to sleep). Personally, I’m hoping for George Clooney. He likes a good cause and, as well as giving me something nice to look at, he’d be sure to bring a couple of martinis to help ameliorate the pain.