By Melanie Dale
@melanierdale

When my kids were little, I looked at the bleary-eyed older parents around me with pity. They spoke of weekend nights staying up till their teens made it home safely and complained of pubescent bodies lying in repose until well past noon. I was dealing with three-year-old middle of the night banshee screaming and kids needing help pouring the milk at the crack of dawn. Teens who stayed up late and slept in all morning? Sounded like a dream come true. I couldn’t wait till my kids grew up and adopted the same schedule I already wanted. I was ready to binge watch Supernatural all night and sleep all day. Bring it on, puberty.

But then we started getting up at 6 a.m. each morning to shove them in the big yellow school bus when it was still pitch black outside. My body started waking up at 6 a.m. on weekends. WEEKENDS. No-no, body. Stupid body. Saturdays are for sleepy. But the damage was done and I was reprogrammed. Up at dawn, exhausted by seven at night, I’d make it till bedtime then shut down fast. Then I crossed into my forties and seven became six, became five, became four, and I was drinking an entire French press carafe to make it through the afternoon.

Then BOING! I would wake up at six in the morning, then five, then four. What was this horrifying trend? I was becoming my father, who accomplishes an entire day’s work before sunrise.

Nobody warned me that just when my kids started staying up later at night and sleeping in in the morning, some latent genetic code from my morning people ancestors would kick in and render me unable to keep my eyes open past ten and raring to go by four in the morning. “Sleep when the baby sleeps” no longer works when the baby is sixteen and crawling in bed with me to unpack her day.

Even in my zombielike state, I love these late night conversations. As I drift off to the Land of Nod, first my daughter, then my son, sneak into my room, suddenly energized and ready to talk about their feelings, relationships, burgeoning political opinions, and thoughts on everything from vaping to teen pregnancy. These are the moments I live for. I am ready to hear their innermost secrets, as soon as I pull my saliva-coated bite guard out of my mouth, coax my earplugs out of my ears, slide my glasses onto my face, and pretend like I was awake and waiting for them this whole time.

The nice thing about already being in bed when these conversations occur is that I have easy access to my pillow, for screaming into right after they leave. Because some of these conversations … hot dang. They know more now than we ever knew at that age. Some stuff I just learned last year. The access to information is staggering, so it’s probably just as well that I’m already lying down while they share all their newfound knowledge.

I remember my baby boy sleeping on my chest, feeling his tiny warm body rising and falling with my breath. He’s 5’9” now and barely fits on my bed, but he drapes himself across my feet like a retriever puppy with big paws.

I remember nights with my new nine-year-old girl, and one more story and one more story and just one more till I convinced her we’d make new memories tomorrow but now was sleepy time. Then, I told the stories and now, she tells them to me. “Mom, so guess what happened…”

Nothing can prepare me for the rest of that sentence. Oh, don’t make me guess, because I will always go immediately to axe murderers, drug dealers, and pregnant with quadruplets.

But I want to hear what happened, so I fix my face and raise my eyebrow nonchalantly. Tell me your story, and I hope they live happily ever after. What an honor to get to hear it, if only I can stay awake till the magic sharing hour, when inhibitions come down. What happens at bedtime stays at bedtime, and there’s an unspoken understanding that bedtime confessions are protected by double jeopardy and cannot be re-tried in the harsh light of day.

My current sleep routine, here in the teen parenting years, the years of middle age and perimenopause and seismic hormonal shifts, is bedtime at 10pm, groggy office hours from 10:30-11:30pm – at which point the kids wander downstairs to regale their night owl dad with more stories – sleep from 11:30-midnight, wake up with a bang and think it’s morning, realize it’s not, toss and turn and read and beg for sleep from midnight to 4am, get up, make myself peanut butter and honey toast, drip peanut butter and honey all over the bed while I eat it, fall back asleep from 4-5am, wake up feeling like Billy Butcherson in Hocus Pocus, and start the day with a pound of coffee and about 400 vitamins.

Then it’s my turn to crawl in bed with the big babies. “Schoooool tiiiiime,” I whisper, then declare, then shout, till they squirm out of their covers. They grunt in my general direction, but I know what’s coming. Later, after school, and work, and activities, they’ll be back in my bed ready to tell me all about it, if only I can stay awake.

The thing I’m learning about parenting, is no matter how old your kids are, you’re going to be tired.

Photo by Ashlee Gadd.