Bedtime

Bedtime used to be a breeze in our house. Both kids have always been solid sleepers (a fact about which I suspect I may on occasion have been somewhat smug - boy is that karma now coming to bite me in the ass), and for four blissful years after he graduated from cot to bed Small Child seemed to have a cast iron belief that once he was in that bed, there was no possibility of leaving it until the morning - almost as if convinced that the floor was electrified and would shock him if he made contact with it.

Times have changed.

Bedtime (or "%^&@#$ bedtime", as it has come to be known chez nous) has somehow, out of absolutely nowhere, become a Groundhog Day-esque horror show, an absurdist game of whack-a-mole in which you tuck one child in to find the other hanging from the banisters, or rifling through the fridge, or covered in toothpaste, or naked. And once that offending child has been rescued/cleaned/dressed and appropriately chastised, you turn round only to find the other one doing something equally transgressive. And that cycle is repeated, again and again, until a point where there really is no alternative but to lose your temper - spectacularly, volcanically lose it - and doors are slammed on crying children sitting alone in the darkness, and everybody feels like they have failed, and apologies are made, and the child, feeling wronged and forgiven, takes the opportunity to push his or her luck and begin it all again.

Take last night, for instance. Last night was a doozy.

7.30pm: I get home from work. I am tired - bonecrushingly, viscerally, physically and mentally exhausted - I've run home, totalling 20km for the day and passing 434km for the month. The kids are watching Teen Titans Go and demanding jelly beans. My refusal is met by tears (her) and bile (him). I feel loved.

7.45pm: Mr H gets home. I ask the kids to go upstairs and brush their teeth. They have to be asked (nicely, I might add) nine times before they actually do it.

8pm: Mr H gets on a conference call and exhorts the house to please moderate their volume. I wonder at the relentless optimism required for it even to have crossed his mind that any such moderation might be an option. I read Smaller Child the compulsory four stories (which have been the same four stories, every day, for the last four weeks - but that's another story of suicide ideation altogether), and ask her to get in bed, before I realise that she is inexplicably wet. A long and fraught negotiation ensues over what would be a suitable replacement for her sodden top (me: anything that fits will do; her: absolutely nothing will do). We finally, after inevitable tears, settle on an oversized Ibiza Rocks t-shirt. She's clearly not convinced.

8.10pm: The cup containing her milk is wrong. WTF? It's the Finding Dory cup with the pink lid - which is the right cup (or has been for the last five days at least). After tearful remonstration from Smaller Child, I ascertain that of the two Finding Dory cups we own, HERS is the one that has the pink lid AND the (tiny) picture of Nemo on it. THIS cup is not HER cup. It is her lid, but not her cup. She cannot drink milk from any other cup. My (I think reasonable) argument that since the light is going off anyway she won't be able to tell the difference, is met with more tears. We are on the verge of hysteria, in fact. I decide the fight isn't worth it, go downstairs, replace the cup.

8.15pm: Twenty-five minutes behind schedule ("'Schedule'!!! HA!!!!") I tuck Smaller Child in, plead with her to stay there. She looks sleepy. I am hopeful. I am stupid.

8.20pm: I am reading The BFG to Small Child. He's throwing Lego around the room, making this more of an exercise in task completion than interaction. A crash comes from upstairs. I put down the book. Smaller Child is walking down the stairs, already crying in anticipation of my displeasure. I feel somehow chastened by her expectation of anger. She's sent a bag of coat hangers skittling down a flight of steps - noisy but no harm done. What was she doing upstairs though?! Forget it, I don't want to know. I cling to the brittle straw of hope that maybe the guilt at having already broken the rules will keep her in bed this time. Yep, stupid.

8.40pm: I am still reading the BFG. How long is this sodding chapter??? "Twenty-three pages", Small Child informs me, turning from his Lego looking gleeful and victorious. "Oh," he says, looking through the half-open doorway, surprised, "She's out of her room. And she's naked". He's half right - the Ibiza Rocks t-shirt is gone but she does at least have trousers on. I call time on the BFG. I pick her up, deposit her in bed without ceremony, slam the door, go downstairs, sit on the sofa breathing heavily and thinking about wine.

8.41pm: Guiltily I am soothing Smaller Child's racking sobs. She puts the Ibiza Rocks t-shirt back on. "I won't do it again mummy". Surely, this time, she won't? (Stupid, again.) I go downstairs and open a bottle of wine. It's really the only way.

8.50pm: Noise from upstairs. I sit on the sofa with my ears pricked, wondering whether it's at a level where I need to deal with it (other than by drinking more wine, of course). Feet on the landing. Shit. One of them's out of their room. Climb the stairs. It's him. He's in her room. I tell him to get back in his room, close the door. She's wailing again. He's stolen her favourite toy. I retrieve it, repatriate it. The crying eventually subsides.

9.20pm: I've finally managed to eat dinner. Mr H has finished his call. More noise from upstairs - rustling, a dull thumping, the sound of feet again. Resigned, I climb the stairs for what feels like the thousandth time, as if going to the scaffold. Smaller Child is standing on the landing. She is wearing butterfly wings. From the waist down, she is stark naked. She looks at me, my mouth hanging open, my expression caught somewhere between rage, disbelief, and an almost irrepressible desire to burst out laughing. "I need a wee," she says. I have by this point made a clear choice to travel the path of least resistance this evening. I pick her up, plonk her on a toilet. She looks at me. We stay there together, silent, eyes locked, for maybe five minutes. She doesn't need a wee at all. Stupid, see? I take her back to her room, tuck her in for the fifth time. The entire contents of her wardrobe are on the floor. I pretend I haven't seen it.

9.40pm: Mr H has gone out. Small Child is downstairs. "I'm hungry". I tell him there's nothing I can do about that at this stage in the day, that he should have eaten his dinner, that he should go to bed. He ignores me, goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge, complains about the broccoli to chocolate ratio it contains. I shepherd him back upstairs, shut his door, rest my forehead against it, count to ten.

10.30pm: Small Child is downstairs. Again. "I want the cat in my room". Why is he still awake?! Despairing, I think about going to bed myself, the only surefire way to end the cycle of bedtime hell other than leaving the house, which may or may not end it but, from the perspective of the absent parent, is a merely philosophical question akin to that of the tree falling in the wood. Instead, I try to explain to him, as I have done so many times before, that it is late, that it is grown-up time, that I have had a long day and I'm tired and I just want some peace and quiet, and can he please just go back to bed and stay there. "But mummy," he says, "I'm basically a grown-up already. And anyway, don't you want to spend time with me?" There's nothing like an emotionally manipulative sleep-averse six-year-old to make you feel like utter crap.

11pm: I hear Small Child's door open upstairs. "Mummy..." he says. I give up and go to bed.

What feels like five minutes later, it is morning. Smaller Child is up first. She is wearing an entirely different outfit to the one I last saw her in. Not for the first time in the last 12 hours, I pretend I haven't seen it. Downstairs, she demands bacon. He, of course, is still asleep, having been awake until probably gone midnight, doing god knows what. I leave to run into the office, the cycle starting again.

Writing this now, I wonder whether this recurring bedtime nightmare is some kind of twisted rite of passage imposed on me by the cosmos, trapping me, like Bill Murray and Punxutawney Phil, inside an inescapable vortex of mundanity and ridiculousness on repeat, day in day out, until such time as I get it right.  Lord knows I have tried. I've tried starting the bedtime process earlier, tried starting it later. I've tried discipline, I've tried leniency. I have read Rainbow Fish thirty times in a row and not complained about it (much). I have substituted fun bubble baths for functional showers. I have weathered the seemingly endless nightwear-selection debate with a smile glued to my face, over and over again. I have found the Nemo cup, washed it, replenished it, handed it over cheerfully while cursing inside. I have climbed the stairs so many times I am seriously contemplating moving into an apartment. I have in the darkness trodden on Lego, got Shopkins wedged between my bare toes, so often I've lost count. I've cajoled, pleaded, negotiated, bribed, threatened, yelled, cried. Nothing works. Give her an inch and she'll take a mile, but say no and you are faced immediately with tears; and as for him, well, the problem with him is that, when all's said and done, he basically just doesn't give a shit.

So, bad mummy/good mummy, present mummy/absent mummy, happy mummy/sad mummy... I've worn all the hats, and none of them had a rabbit inside. And thinking about it now, thinking about where that leaves me, I realise that although I may have no choice in or control over my feral offspring's nocturnal hijinks, I do have a choice as to how I let it affect me. So, as of now, I choose to enjoy it. I choose to interpret their egregious bedtime behaviour as a demonstration of love - to believe not that they want to torture me (which is what it mostly feels like) but that they want to spend time with me (which, in fairness, is probably much closer to the truth, no matter how questionable their methods). After all, who knows how long that will be the case? For sure it won't last for ever, even though, at 10 o'clock at night when you're wiping baby lotion off the traumatised cat, fishing books out of the toilet bowl, or trying to find the right goddam Finding Dory cup for the hundredth time, it may feel like it will never end.

In the meantime, I will cling to the hope that it's a phase, that we will emerge from this storm just as unexpectedly as we found that we had sailed into it... probably straight into another one, but one step at a time, hey?

And if, on occasion, that hope falters too... well, there's always wine.