A lot of stay-at-home parents talk about that “witching hour” that their toddlers go through. I guess it is rumored to be around dinnertime when they are cooking for their spouses. I don’t really know about that any more. I haven’t cooked dinner for a spouse since Sami was about 9 months old.

Now that I am a single mama with full custody of my kiddo, we pretty much do whatever we want, whenever we want. One night last week we braved rush hour Beltway traffic and went for a sunset exursion to Great Falls National Park. When it approached dusk, we went to Tyson’s Corner mall (on our way back) and Sami went wild in the play area by the food court. Then we went on to partake in some crazy retail therapy at the Evil Empire for Children Store and I bought Sami his favorite Little Einstein dolls. We shut the damn place down. Was it indulgent? Yes! But it felt awesome.

These days, Sami has been living the rock star toddler kind of life. I don’t tend to get started on the bedtime routine until about 9 pm. It’s not intentional, it just seems to work out that way.

We do a bath most days, but not all. This involves the liberal use of bubbles, and a bubble wand, which Sami never grows tired of hiding under the bubbles and procuring.

“Where’s the wand?” he asks with a mischievious glint in his eye.
“Here it is!!” he answers himself.

Then goes the humorous but slippery attempt to extract him from the bath before he turns into a prune (this usually inolves him writhing around in leftover bubbles in an empty tub for about ten minutes), getting him into his PJs, getting teeth brushed (if we’re really on top of it) and then heading into his room to read books. Sami’s Book Club picks of the month are: The Hanukkah Mice, Green Eggs and Ham, some poorly-written book about an ice cream truck that he has pretty much memorized, Sweet Dreams, Maisy, and of course, Good Night Moon. After I’ve read the books, then the fun really begins. I call this *my* witching hour.

It has been an odd and convoluted transition from the Family Bed to his own bed in his own room. For reasons beyond the scope of this blog (but which you might be able to guess at) I have decided it’s time to have my bed to myself. It’s kind of a mean, dictator-like thing to do, as he would have been cool to stay in the Family Bed probably until puberty, but I am trying to impose my draconian will as gently and with as much love as I can.

I’m doing some weird combination of the Sleep Lady book and the No-Cry Sleep Solution. I call it the Cry as Little as Possible Sleep Solution, as there has been some crying involved (maybe mine more than his). At this point I have been lying on a mattress, which I’ve moved farther and farther away from his bed over the course of two months. As of tonight I am now officially in the hallway. The next part is a bit hazy to me but I think it might involve me leaving and coming back every few minutes or so. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. All I know is I’m either doing something right or the gods of sleep have intervened. Sami sleeps through the night about 50% of the time, and the rest of the time he only wakes up once a night. This is a massive improvement over two months ago, when he was awakening pretty much every two hours after midnight and physically needed me to go back to sleep each time.

So…after the stories, I tuck him into his “Big Boy Bed (BBB)” and kiss him goodnight. He protests mightily. I sing some lullabies. I already begin to get annoyed because he is not behaving as I want him to. In my fantasy, I tuck him into his little bed, give him a kiss and a hug, stand at the door for about two seconds, and he falls fast asleep. Reality: from the time I get him into his bed, it usually takes an hour to an ninety minutes until he is asleep. Tonight he didn’t crash until 11 pm. Part of that may be due to the Long and Late Nap (today he slept from 2 pm - 4:30 pm) and my brain tells me, “It’s All Your Fault.” I have a lot of bad mommy guilt about the Long and Late Naps, but I need a break in the middle of the day! So I take it. The Sleep Lady would not agree with my tactics, but hey! I’m doing the best I can.

So…dharma-wise, what I notice in this hour is that my head becomes an avalanche of anger, impatience, and frustration. I have to tell him about 10-20 for the first 10 minutes to lay down in the bed and put his head on the pillow. He keeps popping up. It would be funny if I let it be. But I tend to take it all very seriously at the time. Sometimes, when I have been lying there for an hour and a half, and he is still thrashing around under the covers, I feel like my chest is going to implode. The anger is not really directed at him or his actions, per se, he’s just a convenuient surface excuse. Sami’s sleep shit is nothing but a story to which I have attached my anger. I’ve realized that. It’s just there, an energy coursing through me. A rage at myself which spills out at night when my son is trying to sleep.

I think about the skill of sleep and how odd that we should need to be taught to do it. I think about separation and togetherness. I am present for him as he falls asleep, and I come into his room when he awakens, but I generally am a good twelve feet away from him when he sleeps. Part of me feels terrible that I am not able or willing to snuggle my son to sleep any longer, and to physically get him back to sleep every time he awakens. Another part of me is relieved that the Family Bed days are over and then I feel like crap for being relieved about it. It’s a painful and wretched process, especially when I slather on all this self-judgment and guilt on top of a simple fact: my son is going to sleep.

It’s really not so bad. Often, I fall asleep with him, on the mattress twelve feet away, and I wake up to the sound of him softly snoring, the room lit in a weird shade of alien green from his funky night light. Tonight I used his thrashing around under the covers time to think about this blog post. I went over my Aries New Moon intentions, dreamed some ridiculous so-good-that-they-have-to-come-true kind of dreams, and just spent some time being with my breath. That kind of energy was much more of what I want to cultivate. All this mental yakkity-yakking is just habit. What we feed grows, and what we starve, dies. Personally, I want to cultivate a joyful, open heart-mind…and to starve the crap out of my angry, impatient, guilt-ridden mind. Yes, I accept that the anger is there, but BTDT and I want to move on.

“Just keep showing up,” a Zen teacher said to me the other day in an interview. I did show up for a sit with my sangha last week, but I slept through half of it. Most of the time, I was aware that I was sleeping, or heading into sleep, and it felt like the right thing to do. “Sloth and torpor” is supposed to be one of the Five Hindrances, but my attitude was “fuck that. I need the rest.” It is a practice in and of itself, sleep.