Middle-Of-The-Night Logic

I know some families probably tuck their children in to sleep, turn off the lights, and enjoy a nice quiet sleep until the light of a new day wakes them from their blissful slumber. Not here. Ever since four babies popped into our life in a very short period of time, sleeping through an entire night has been more of a theory than a reality. A wonderful, appealing theory. Like the theory that if you save your money you will someday not live paycheck to paycheck. Or the theory that if everybody just puts their own stuff away, your house will always be clean.

For us the middle of the night is full of chaos and slow-motion, confusing, melodrama. Like when Emery woke me up to tell me she had had a bad dream, and, my middle-of-the-night logic made me tell her that everything would be okay if she would just walk back to her bedroom backwards, and her middle-of-the-night logic made her do as I had said.

Sometimes, though, your quiet, peaceful body can be seized and possessed by the middle-of-the-night terror.

My husband must have had a nightmare. I say must have because of how he handled it. In the dead of night, he bolted upright in the middle of the bed, stared straight ahead, and screamed at top level. I had several options available to me at that point. I could have gone all wild ninja on him like I so would have done had I been using middle-of-the-day logic. I could have been concerned about him and tried to comfort and reassure him. I say that is an option mainly to make myself feel better because there is NO WAY middle-of-the-night Sharla would ever have such a sane reaction. What I chose to do was to copy him. Exactly. So there were two of us sitting in the middle of the bed, staring straight ahead, screaming. Joining my scream to his terrified him further, so he doubled his screaming volume. His increase in volume convinced me that screaming into the dead of night was the most important thing I had ever done.

Our scream party caused all kinds of excitement for the children who swarmed into our room and surrounded our bed. Their sweet, terrified faces splashed me with a dose of reality, and I soon saw the absurdity of side by side screaming into the night. I began to laugh. Then Mike laughed, and, because we have successfully warped our children, they joined in the laughter.

I don't know if it is a sad reflection of our acceptance of the bizarre or proof of our strength of mind, but ten minutes later we were all sound asleep again. That's how we do things around here.