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.

I Like That

Lying in bed last night at one in the morning with my daughter, we were the last ones awake. I was reading my book. She was trying to settle down for sleep. She has been sleeping with my deodorant under her pillow the last two nights. She doesn’t want me to see because she’s afraid I will take it away from her. She goes under her blanket and opens the deodorant. I can tell she’s busy doing something. I ask her what she is doing. She says, “don’t look.” It’s too late. I have already glimpsed her rubbing deodorant all over her hands. “Are you putting that on your hands?” I ask. “Yes. I like that,” she mutters. “Does it feel good?” I wonder. My kids are an endless source of information about things I have never tried. “Yes,” she answers tersely. “Well, don’t twist it up too high so it breaks off. And don’t dig your fingers in it,” I remind her. OK. She won’t, she says. “Thanks for telling me.” Thanks for telling her? She knows how to melt my heart. She has such uncontrollable desires to spread, smear and paint with anything smearable. I’ll admit I have gotten quite upset with her many times because of the messes she makes. “I like that,” she mutters under her blanket. A little while later I notice she has slipped out of bed. She comes back with blue eyeshadow heavy on her eyelids. Her hair is parted down the middle and slicked down with water. She is dripping and shivering slightly. I go back to the bathroom with her and dry her off. She asks me not to mess up her hair. Then she climbs into bed, slides the deodorant under the pillow and falls asleep. I think about how I have a need to keep things somewhat organized and unpainted. And she needs to mix paints and color her body. She needs to dwell in the possibilities of creams and colors and the whole world as her canvas.
Earlier that day she went out into the garage. We have paints and paper set up out there. She wanted to paint. I didn’t want to stop what I was doing to help her. And she had been asking for two days to paint. I had put her off long enough. I could tell she was determined to do it whether I said yes or not. I just asked her to at least take off her dress first. A little while later I peaked at her. There she was with pink paint spilling around her. She was still in her dress. I yelled at her, “I told you to take off your dress.” She got perturbed with me and showed me that there was no paint on it. I told her I want to keep it that way so take it off while she paints. This is, of course, not at all how I like to talk to my children. I take great pains to work with them and help them be successful in a very supportive and loving way. I also try to balance my own need for calm and quiet with their need for rambunctious experimentation without being overbearing and punitive. But lately I have been feeling self-absorbed and impatient. When she comes into the house with paint on the bottoms of her feet, I sigh loudly. She sighs back at me. Clearly she is just as frustrated with me being frustrated with her. Her muttering, “I like that,” under the blanket like the incantation of a bag lady brings it to light for me. She really needs to touch and feel and rub and paint. I remind myself to reach her there and help her meet that need. She also desperately needs to know that I still love her even when I get angry. Whenever I raise my voice at her, she makes a kiss at me and says, “Mommy, I love you.” And when I get really mad like when she poured syrup on the carpet, she asks me, “Mommy, do you still love me?” “Of course I love you,” I answer. “I’m just really frustrated right now. I always love you even when I’m mad at you.” It’s the best I can do sometimes. I would love to greet these situations with patience and a peaceful, “Ah, well, let’s clean it up. Please ask for help if you need the syrup.” Or, “please do your Picasso drawing with face paint crayons on paper instead of the carpet.” I’m still working on my reaction. Isn’t that the very definition of mindfulness? Bringing clarity and peace to the most stressful moments. I’m a work in progress.
At the park last week another mother and I were talking about our daughters and how they draw on furniture and walls, etc. no matter how many times we have asked them to stop. This is a mother that, I can already tell I have very little in common with. She has already said a few motherisms that I recognize, such as, “I don’t let my son…” or “we don’t allow this and such.” Just the typical bossy way moms talk about their kids while their kids are young and they still feel in charge. The kind of annoying smugness that says she is clearly doing the right thing. What she said about her daughter was, “she has been threatened within an inch of her life,” to stop drawing on the walls and furniture, etc. Of course she didn’t mean it literally. I know how exasperating it is to have girls who believe their whole world is an extension of their bodies and their bodies are their canvas. I wonder how many of them are out there. Parents at their wits end. Girls desperate for artistic expression, promising not to do it again. Then, unable to help themselves, doing it again and again. I’m reminded that there is no end to what a person will do in a position of authority if they feel they have to make a child do what they say. Perhaps threatened within an inch of her life is not such an exaggeration after all. I remember my aunt almost bragging about how she spanked her daughter so hard she gave her bruises. Her daughter kept running across the street to visit her friend without looking and without permission. This happened years ago but my stomach turned when she told this story at my cousin’s wedding shower.
At some point you have to stop and ask yourself, how far am I willing to go with this. This kind of forceful control so easily leads to violence. You have to realize she will grow out of it. So, I will keep reminding my daughter. I will keep cleaning up after her and even ask for her help. I will encourage her to follow her interests. And I fervently hope she will continue to be true to herself.

New posts/ Old posts

Anything before is considered an old post. I saved a few of my favorites and deleted the rest. I plan to use this blog as a space to work through my neurotic ramblings on parenting and unschooling - however selfish or saintly it may be.