The Family Bed is Not For Everyone

Caleb woke me sometime in the middle of the night last night. I knew it was some hazy early morning hour. I could tell I had been asleep at least a couple of hours after I had gone to bed at midnight. He was begging me to come into the living room and help him turn on a movie. I told him to just crawl in bed with me and let's go to sleep. He refused. I told him to use the remote. He said some vague reason that he couldn't. He kept waking me up when I would doze off. The half asleep conversation continued with "no, you come in here." "No, you come in the living room to sleep," and back and forth. Up until 6 months ago, Caleb shared our family bed. Now that he is 8 he desperately wants to be independent and sleep on his own. But he has these nights where he still wants to sleep with me. Only, he wants me to come in with him to the living room, neutral territory.


I should explain our family bed. I sleep with my 2 daughters in their bedroom. We have 2 twin beds squashed together. Caleb slept with us there until recently. Now he sleeps on the couch watching his favorite Spongebob DVD. I guess you could say it is a partial family bed. My husband sleeps in our lovely sleigh bed which he bought as a gift for me. And my oldest son sleeps in his own bed in his own room - lights out, door closed at midnight (his choice). My husband and I do not sleep together. We have been married 16 years and we are still madly in love. But sleep together we do not. Sex is a different story, if you really must know. Having 4 children makes you an opportunist whether you sleep together or not. We have fabulous but short sessions as often as possible. We recently had a weekend getaway to a cabin on a lake where it rained the whole weekend. We did a lot of catching up! Sometimes we can't keep our hands off each other which might be a little sickening to those who know us. And there are those nights when I wake up,see that the girls are sound asleep and I sleepwalk in to our grownup bed and snuggle. But I have to admit he has gotten used to sprawling out in the middle of the bed, as if, perhaps, he doesn't mind too terribly much. I have to think back a couple of years to remember how this all came about. We had neighbors who had a family bed before our first son was born. That was the first I had heard of it. But it didn't seem like a fit for our family. We ended up getting a crib and encouraging our kids to sleep in their own beds. I would bring them to our bed to nurse. But I believed in the sanctity of the master bed. This was the place where grownups sleep, as if this was some sacred order, some unquestionable rule. I've learned to question quite a lot of things since then. It wasn't until my oldest son was 7 that the family bed finally made sense. I remember reading about mindfulness and peaceful parenting - what Naomi Aldort calls authentic parenting. The revelation that each one of my kids, no matter what they do, is doing exactly what they need to do in that moment. All of his "acting out" and behavior issues were for a reason, not because something was wrong with him. Caleb was plagued with nightmares and would crawl in bed with us every night. He was getting bigger and our bed was getting cramped. We decided to let him move his twin mattress onto the floor in our room. Zane wanted nothing to do with a change in sleeping arrangements. By this time we had twin babies. They quickly outgrew the bring the baby to bed, stick her on the boob and fall back to sleep in the middle of the night routine. I was forever creeping out of bed in the night to get the girls back to sleep up in their nursery. Once they learned how to get out of their cribs (at a very young age) and open the door, I knew it was over. I took apart the cribs, put a mattress on the floor in their room and slept with them. My husband, a great father and loving spouse, has absolutely no patience when it comes to sleeping with children. When he is tired, he wants to go to bed right then. Then he morphs into the grumpy old troll - and believe me nobody wants to be near him. It's better that he falls to sleep by himself. I love him. He knows I love him. He missed me for a long time. But he finally agreed that it was just sleeping. If we could have a satisfying sex life, then he could live without the sleeping together part. After we moved, we set up the family bed in the girls' room for me, Caleb and the girls. Caleb has a room and bed of his own that he uses to store his clothes and toys. Part of the reason he moved into the living room was to get out of sleeping in the girls' room. He is very sensitive to things that take away from his "boy"ness. And sleeping with his mom in his sisters' room was clearly cramping his "lost boy" style. It is important for him to get me into neutral territory to have the comfort of mom close by.


Finally I agreed to help him turn on his movie. I stumble into the living room. But the movie is already on. All he has to do is push play. I realize he must have been desperate to lie to get me in there. I push play. He begs me to tuck him in and sit for a while. I tuck him in and go back to bed, because I was already asleep, damn it. I go to the bathroom in the dark with the door open. I see him run past me down the hall. I call to him. He finds me, wondering how I can pee in the dark. I tell him I don't have to aim. Then I go back to bed. He follows me and asks for a hug. It was during that hug that I realize what is bothering him tonight. He saw his first dead person yesterday. It was my grandfather in an open casket. It's not the first time I have seen one. I saw my grandmother in the exact same funeral home 15 years ago. But she looked beautiful and peaceful, if not quite asleep. My grandfather, on the other had, looked pasty and thin. In fact, he didn't look much like himself at all. Each one of our kids went down to look in the casket. The girls took it in stride as they usually do. Although Carmen was not happy about going back into the viewing room when it was time for the funeral. As we were gathering to file in, she asked a little too loudly, "why do we have to go in the room with the dead guy?" Caleb, in his quiet way, hides how he feels until the middle of the night.. As I'm hugging him, I ask, "this is about the funeral, isn't it?" He says yes. I go with him into the living room and stay until he falls asleep.