by Jim Gaffigan
Then Jeannie and I can watch television or read for exactly one minute before they all wake up and come into our bed. Curtain.
So how do we have time to make all these babies, you might ask? Well, that’s none of your business, you pervert. Why don’t you go reread that dirty book with the tie on the cover? I can’t believe you read that stuff! Scandalous! I’m sorry. Maybe I’m overreacting. I’m grateful you bought my nondirty book. You obviously are a good person … with some naughty secrets. I won’t hold your creepiness against you.
Negotiating with Terrorists
Exactly one million years ago, there was a television show called The Waltons. Each episode of The Waltons would end with an exterior shot of the Waltons’ home at nighttime. The camera would hold on the house as the family said their round robin of goodnights as the light in the windows went out. Each person in the family would chime in. “Goodnight, Mama; goodnight, Daddy.” “Goodnight, Jim-Bob; goodnight, John-Boy.” This would go on for about a minute. It was adorable; it was sweet and probably the most unrealistic portrayal of bedtime for parents ever displayed in any art form.
Of course bedtime is a misleading term. It should be categorized with the word utopia. “Bedtime” gives the impression that your children will be in bed, going to sleep at a specific time. Any parent of a five-year-old will tell you this is not a plausible reality. Bedtime with young children is a nightly crisis. Part of me is relieved that most of my shows coincide with bedtime, and therefore I have a valid excuse to remove myself from this catastrophic paradox.
Bedtime makes you realize how completely incapable you are of being in charge of another human being. My children act like they’ve never been to sleep before. “Bed? What’s that? No, I’m not doing that.” They never want to go to bed. This is another thing that I will never have in common with my children. Every morning when I wake up, my first thought is, “When can I come back here?” It’s the carrot that keeps me motivated. Sometimes going to bed feels like the highlight of my day.
Ironically, to my children, bedtime is a punishment that violates their basic rights as human beings. Once the lights are out, you can expect at least an hour of inmates clanging their tin cups on the cell bars. They turn against us in a unified protest as fervent as the civil rights marches of the 1960s. “This is unfair!” Before the pajama burning begins, we move quickly into action following the “divide and conquer” strategy.
Part of our bedtime ritual involves Jeannie and I lying down with our kids. We’ll cuddle them, read to them, tell them stories, and eventually beg them to sleep. This strategy always begins as a wonderful, intimate experience and then ends with threats and tears. And sometimes the kids get upset, too. Inevitably it becomes a hostage negotiation, but in reverse. “If you stay in there, we will give you whatever you want. What do you need, a helicopter to Cuba? We will meet all of your demands if you just stay in there and don’t hurt anyone!”
With five little kids, there is no ending to bedtime. There is always one awake. Like they are taking shifts. I imagine they have scheduling meetings: “All right, I’ll annoy Dad from midnight to two. Who wants the three-to-six-a.m. shift? Now everyone lie down and practice kicking Dad in your sleep.” Whenever one of my children says, “Goodnight, Daddy,” I always think to myself, “You don’t mean that.”
My Former Bed
I love my bed. It was a big investment. It’s a Tempur-Pedic. You may have seen one of their annoying commercials on television where overly excited Tempur-Pedic owners make the appeal “Ask me about my Tempur-Pedic!” “Ask me how fast I fall asleep!” I always want to chime in, “Ask me why my Tempur-Pedic is filled with a horde of children every morning and I’m so uncomfortable.”
This is because my bed, our bed, is a “family bed.” There are two philosophies when it comes to getting young children to sleep. There is “sleep training,” which basically involves putting your kids to bed and listening to them scream all night, or there is “attachment parenting,” which essentially involves lying down with your kids, cuddling them, and then listening to them scream all night. The family bed is an additional aspect of attachment parenting.
Since Jeannie is a big believer in attachment parenting and I’m a spineless coward, we have instituted an open-door policy, meaning if one of our kids has a nightmare, they are welcome to come in our room and pee in our bed. Luckily this only happens every night.
I don’t know if you have ever slept next to someone that has wet the bed, but it’s delightful. You’re asleep, right? So when you wake up, your first thought is, “Oh my God, I wet the bed!” For me, my next thought is, “Well, it’s not that wet. I’ll just scoot over a bit. If I act like I’m sleeping, maybe Jeannie will change the sheets.” Some of my finest acting has been pretending to be asleep while Jeannie cleans up the mess. I’ll groggily comment, “Oh, I didn’t notice that. Hey, while you’re up, can you make me a sandwich?”
Sometimes I’m awake when one of my kids will stumble into my room. I’ll be innocently watching TV when I’ll catch a shadowy figure in our bedroom doorway out of the corner of my eye. It always scares the hell out of me. They’ll just be standing there blankly staring like they should be holding a knife. After I ask if they are okay, they’ll climb in our bed and proceed to complain that I have the TV on.
“Turn off the TV!” my six-year-old son, Jack, will whine. Like I’m interrupting him.
“Why don’t you just go back to your own bed?”
“Dad, turn off the TV—I am TRYING TO SLEEP!”
He’s mostly upset because I’m watching the news. TV news is like kryptonite to children. The two major shifts in taste from childhood to adulthood are news and mustard. Kids hate the news and mustard. Hell, mustard even has the word turd in it. Maybe I should threaten my kids that if they don’t go to bed, I will force them to watch an hour-long newscast about mustard.
I love the fact that if my children wake up scared or are feeling lonely, they can come in our bed. I just wish each and every one of them didn’t do it every single night. There isn’t room. I’m not exaggerating. There are seven people in my family, and there has yet to be a bed created in which we can all comfortably fit. I have a king-size bed, yet my dominion is relegated to the sliver on the right edge. One more peasant revolt and I’ll be on the floor. By the end of the night, I find myself longing for my own cot. It could be made of nails, but it would be my own.
I blame Dr. Sears, the advocate of “attachment parenting,” for this. Obviously I love all the intentions of attachment parenting, but often attachment parenting seems to just be a synonym for “Dad will be uncomfortable” parenting. At this point, I’m in too deep. I can’t just decide now that the kids aren’t allowed in the bed. The younger ones will hold it against me.
MY KID: Dad used to let the older kids sleep in the bed because he loves them way more.
THERAPIST: That’s okay. Your dad is burning in hell right now.
MY KID: What a relief.
I don’t want my kids to want me to burn in hell. I just want my bed back. Jeannie never seems to be bothered by the crowding. She would be comfortable under a blanket of children. Live children, of course.
Before it got crowded.
Morning Has Been Broken
I love sleep. I need sleep. We all do. Of course, there are those people that don’t need sleep. I think they’re called “successful.” For me it’s always a little sad getting out of bed. Every morning after I get up, I always gaze longingly at my bed and lament, “You were wonderful last night. I didn’t want it to end. I can’t wait to see you again …”
I am sure everyone reading this book values their sleep, but I am a sleep enthusiast! My dream is to become one of those grandpas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who just lives in bed. That looked awesome. There aren’t many things that I let interfere with my sleep. Have you ever been asleep at night and you hear a noise you’re convinced is a murderer that’s trying to break into your house and kill you, bu
t instead of getting up and escaping, you just go back to bed? I guess the reasoning is “They can’t kill me if I’m asleep.” I suppose that would be a pretty embarrassing way to die. That would create an awkward moment in heaven.
OTHER GUY IN HEAVEN: How did you die?
ME: I was too lazy to get out of bed. Yeah, I heard the guy in the kitchen. Thought I had an hour.
OTHER GUY IN HEAVEN: Wow. You’re pretty lazy. How’d they let you in here?
ME: My wife got me in. She’s over in the VIP section. Well, I should get back to cleaning up before I have to head back down to hell.
Sleep is too important. Sleep can make you give up any principle.
SOME GUY: Want to help the homeless?
ME: Sure. I’ll help the homeless.
SOME GUY: Meet us Saturday morning at 7 a.m.
ME: [Beat.] Forget the homeless. They’re homeless in the afternoon, too, right? Besides, I think they are big brunch people.
I used to have to negotiate with myself just to get out of bed. “All right, here’s the deal, me. I’ll get up, but I’m not taking a shower. I might be coming back here any minute.” I used to hear the alarm in the morning “Eee-eee-eee-eee” and think, “I can get used to that. I’ll just dream I’m in a techno club.”
I gave up my relationship with sleep a long time ago. We had to break up even though neither of us wanted to. What came between us? Kids. Isn’t that always the case? My kids were against me and sleep from the get-go. They gave me an ultimatum: us or sleep. Before I had time to make up my mind, sleep walked out on me and never came back. Someone should write a country song about it.
Sleep left me with full custody of my children. I’m usually awakened by a foot in my gut or my face, or a foot in my gut and a foot in my face. The result is I’m tired all the time. Even complaining how tired I am exhausts me. I’m so tired that the other day I tried to open my front door with my wallet.
Given how resistant children are to going to bed, I’m not surprised that they wake up so early. It’s not just that they wake up early, it’s how they wake up. I think morning means “speak louder” in little-kid language. My son does not address me in a whisper or even in a normal voice. He bellows three inches from my ear like we are four hundred feet apart. For some reason all my children speak the loudest in the morning. Of course, sometimes Jeannie will get up with the kids and “let me sleep,” but the volume combined with the morning propensity toward temper tantrums makes this generous offer of “letting me sleep” an oxymoron. We have tried letting them stay up a little later so they sleep longer in the morning, but they just wake up more tired, more cranky, and, as a result, more LOUD.
The song goes, “Morning has broken,” and I’m pretty sure my children broke it. Like everything else they break, if they did break it, they’ll never admit it. I can just hear my kid’s explanation.
SON: Morning was already broken, Dad.
ME: Really.
DAUGHTER: Yeah, we just came out here, and it was broken.
I don’t know what’s more exhausting about parenting: the getting up early or the acting like you know what you are doing. Sure, when I was single, I had to occasionally get up early for work, and it was a crisis!
“Jim, you have to get up next Tuesday at 7 a.m.”
“Oh no! I should go to bed now!”
When you have kids, there is a whole different element of crisis. You are not only waking up sleep deprived, but now you are also sleep deprived and in charge of another human being. Not only are they absurdly loud in the morning, they are also ravenously hungry.
“Dad, I’m starving!”
“Go back to bed, it’s too early.”
“But I need to eat or I will die!”
Suddenly they turn into Oliver at the orphanage. Great, now if I don’t get up, I am neglecting the basic needs of my child. Since Jeannie was against my brilliant idea of pouring cereal into dog bowls the night before, I have to get up and feed my kids.
TIME: 6 a.m.
SON: Daddy, we want pancakes!
ME ASLEEP: What? Who? You want what?
SON: Pancakes!
Great, he wants pancakes, and I feel like a pancake. It seems to me that if you are not old enough to make breakfast, you really should not be allowed to get up before 7 a.m. Of course, it doesn’t feel like just getting up. It feels like punishment for every time in your life you complained about being bored. Now you are faced with the challenge of finding something in the house that they want to eat. They may be starving when they wake you up, but then they will complain about everything you try to give them.
Sometimes I’ll make scrambled eggs for my kids, which usually barely get eaten. “They’re too runny.” “What is that, cheese? Ew.” “Is there egg in this?” “I thought you were starving!” “I am, but not for that!” Unless it’s an Easter basket or at IHOP, your little beggars become very choosy. Left to their own devices, they would probably just grab a bag of sugar and a spoon.
Once Marre, six at the time, made breakfast for herself and her brother and little sister. She woke us up and proudly announced, “You don’t have to get up. I made breakfast for me, Jack, and Katie.” When I asked why she had chocolate on her face, she explained they had breakfast dessert.
When I went out in the kitchen, it looked like a tornado had hit a frosting factory. Since Jeannie is usually breastfeeding a baby at this time of the morning, I normally get blamed for these natural disasters.
JEANNIE: What happened out here?
ME: The kids made breakfast dessert.
JEANNIE: Have fun cleaning it up.
Most mornings it feels like it takes more than a village.
Naps Are Payday Loans
Given my passion for sleep, it is no surprise how I feel about naps. I believe in naps. I like to think of naps as a nonverbal way of saying to life, “I quit. I’m sitting this part of the day out.” I understand that naps are usually reserved for babies and old people, but I don’t discriminate. Naps used to be an integral part of my everyday life. Prior to children, a catastrophe for me was when I would sleep so late in the morning that I would miss my nap.
As a new parent, I was pleased to discover that newborns take a lot of naps. It seems like they nap more than they are awake. Newborns nap so much, you’d think they were on drugs or depressed. Always looking to contribute, I’ll often selflessly offer to help get one of our babies to sleep. Sometimes I’ll nap with our fifteen-month-old son to be supportive. Sometimes I’ll nap with our newborn to be supportive. Sometimes I’ll nap alone in homage to our newborn and fifteen-month-old. It’s all about putting kids first, really.
Any parent can tell you how important it is for children up to age two to take a nap. With babies, you always want to avoid the dreaded “over tired” state, and nobody wants to be around a two-year-old who didn’t nap. You’ll never hear a parent say, “He didn’t nap today” about a two-year-old boy that is behaving well. Naps are a necessity.
Unfortunately, around the age of three, there comes a time when napping your child becomes counterproductive. It’s not worth it. The nap during the day for a three-year-old becomes a payday loan. For those of you who don’t understand the connection, a payday loan is for people who can’t seem to make ends meet until their next paycheck, so they go to a loan company (aka thieves) that will give them their paycheck amount early for a huge fee. This is of course unwise, and Suze Orman would be angry with you.
It is equally unwise when applied to napping. If you take the payday loan of some free time by letting your cranky, drowsy three-year-old succumb to the relinquished nap habit, be prepared that your child will be awake very late. When I say awake, I really mean a nuisance to your life and sanity. This is the aforementioned huge fee that you now must pay.
When I say late, I mean late. A three-year-old with insomnia is very similar to a heroin addict going through withdrawal. There is nothing that calms them. They can’t focus. You can’t tell them enough stories. They don�
�t understand why they are still awake four hours past their bedtime. This is commonly understood by all parents of three-year-olds and has inspired great works of literature, such as Go the F-ck to Sleep.
Sure, while your three-year-old naps during the day, you can get some work done, nap yourself, or waste time on the Internet, but at what cost? Now it’s payday, and you squandered your loan on what? Checking Twitter? Somebody call Suze, because you need advice.
Once you have figured out the horrible consequences of the payday loan, you become obsessed with preventing the nap-weaned three-year-old from napping in the middle of the day at all costs. This is not easy. They have napped all their life. They want to nap. They need to nap. You would like them a lot better if they napped. You feel that by keeping them awake, you are putting them through some CIA sleep-deprivation experiment. It seems cruel, yet you find yourself dreaming up ways to keep them awake: “You’re nodding off at four p.m? Time for a cold bath and a hot cup of coffee!”
Then comes the impossible task of enforcing nap prevention when your child is in the care of others. It’s understandable that babysitters love napping children. “She was a delight!” is always code for “She slept for four hours!” Jeannie and I have strict orders to not let Katie fall asleep, but why should the babysitters comply? They will never encounter the consequences of napping a three-year-old. Now we are the naive cosigners that wind up footing the bill when the sitter defaults. The housing crisis could have easily been prevented if someone had simply explained the economics of napping a three-year-old. Prepare for foreclosure on your evening because there’s no bailout in sight.
