I’ll be the first to admit that the name ‘Charlie Sheen’ doesn’t immediately spring to mind when one considers questions concerning parenting. It can, in fact, be argued that the words ‘parenting’ and ‘Charlie Sheen’ should just never be used together in a sentence, if that sentence is not ‘Charlie Sheen has nothing to tell us about parenting,’ or ‘if you want an example of bad parenting, look to Charlie Sheen.’

And yet, and yet… it’s too easy, I think, to just dismiss questions like ‘what questions does the example of Charlie Sheen raise for us as parents?’ with glib replies about ‘what NOT to do’ and jokes about Tiger Mom blood. It’s worth considering, I think, whether a person can be troubled / struggling with addictions / wrestling with mental health issues / experiencing a personal breakdown of any sort and still be a ‘good’ parent (within whatever very broad parameters we place around the designation ‘good’, which, as you know, I resist.) Because, really: don’t most of us, at some point, go through some experience of serious personal difficulty at some point in our lives as parents, whether that difficulty manifests in the complicated form of mental health issues or in other forms? Isn’t it possible that any one of us could lose our proverbial shit at some point – perhaps not to the extent that we declare ourselves tiger-blooded high priest Vatican assassin warlock and take young lovers and spew manic bullshit at the world through mass media, but in some other, more mundane way that could nonetheless have some impact upon our children? Are the sins of the parents always and necessarily visited upon their children?

We discussed this question at Momversation this week. I still don’t know what the answer is; I wouldn’t want Charlie Sheen anywhere near my children, but as a person who identifies herself as living on the crazy spectrum, I worry about how my own batshittery affects my parenting. Anyway. It was an interesting discussion:

What do you think? Can someone like Charlie Sheen (just considering the issue of his crazy, and his public derailment; we set aside the question of his spousal abuse, not because it isn’t relevant, but because we wanted to focus on the mental health / addiction issue) go off the rails – to whatever extent – but still function as a father? Still be capable, whatever that means? Still be loving, lovable, loved? Can any of us? Join the conversation over at Momversation.

Random unrelated addenda:

– Please, if you’re in Toronto and area and are looking for something to do with the family this week, consider coming to see Disney On Ice’s Toy Story 3. If you use the code TANNER to purchase your ticket, a portion of proceeds will go to Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy. Also, I’ll be opening the first show in a tutu. A public ice wipeout disaster is totally possible.

– You have until tomorrow to leave a comment at this post on parenting and the art of air miles maintenance and maybe win a trip to San Antonio, totally on me. Well, on the San Antonio Convention and Visitors Bureau, but still. I’m facilitating you getting it, so.

– It’s a Barbie Dream House world, and you are just not appreciating it sufficiently.

Yesterday, Emilia brought home her very first report card. Emilia is four. Just yesterday she was in diapers and nursing and the only thing that anyone ever reported about her was quantity and quality of her bowel movements. How did we get to report cards?

For the longest time, I couldn’t open it. I’m not sure why. The reasons that I gave myself – that reading others’ evaluations of my child would be awkward and challenging; that the report card was a symbol of school and so a symbol of her moving ever further into a life of her own, a life apart from mine; that I just couldn’t bear to see anything other than the highest praise for my child – were not, in themselves, convincing. They just landed in my psyche and fell limp, like drained water balloons, or banana peels, or something else more figuratively appropriate that I can’t think of right now. I was anxious for all of these reasons, and for none of them, and for a thousand other reasons that I probably wouldn’t understand until sometime around her high school graduation, and as I sifted through these known and unknown and entirely inscrutable reasons for my anxiety, I thought, this is the problem. This. This worry. Not the reasons for the worry. The worry itself.

Here, I realized, is one more set of things to worry about. How is she doing in school? What do her teachers think of her? What does she think of them? Is she thriving? Is she not? What words will be used in her evaluations? What will the words mean? Emilia is working to use her conflict-negotiation skills independently… Emilia uses oral measurement tools correctly… Emilia actively enjoys playing Submarine and is proud of her navigational abilities… Emilia loves to collect data from her peers and explain to the class what this data represents (wait, what?) (Years of graduate training in critical textual analysis and I’m stymied by a junior kindergarten report card. Is my daughter a Black Ops Naval Intelligence Officer in training, or is she just good at math and challenged by conflict? Also, what are ‘oral measurement tools’ and should I be worried?) One more set of things to worry about, one more reason to stock up on Ativan. When does this all end? Does it ever end? Will I be fretting over her tenure review when she’s thirty and teaching International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Goverment?

Motherhood, for me, has been a complicated mixture of anxiety and joy. The joy, obviously, outweighs the anxiety – by volumes it outweighs the anxiety – but the anxiety is always, always there, lurking in the dark corners and bursting into the light when I least expect it, casting shadows, imposing a chill. Emilia’s junior kindergarten report card – the first report card of years and years of report cards – was a reminder that there are anxieties awaiting me that I haven’t even yet thought about, anxieties that lurk in shadowy corners that I’m not even yet aware of. That I’m not prepared for these worries me – but to devote my energies to seeking them out in advance just fosters a different kind of anxiety, and so I find myself caught in a cycle of worrying about worrying and worrying about worrying about worrying, and you can see how this could be a problem.

I don’t want this to be problem. I want to just get her report card and snicker a little over her teacher’s observation that Emilia is quick to raise her hand and eager to share ideas and ask questions but sometimes needs to be reminded to let her peers ask questions, too and not be so quick to sweat the small stuff and to remember that, really, it is all small stuff, so long as we’ve always got the joy.

And we do have the joy. Also, data-collection.

How do you fight the impulse to obsess over small worries? Do you obsess – even a little – over the small worries? Or is this just me? You can tell me if I’m crazy. I kind of already know.

(IS a report card a small worry? It’s not, is it? It’s HUGE, isn’t it? IT IS. See, I’m totally not crazy. I am ALERT. I know a your-kid-is-so-totally-going-to-be-a-Mossad-agent warning when I see one. SO THERE.)

(I am so freaking doomed.)

I just spent a wonderful weekend in Houston, cavorting and plotting and reflecting and deep-thinking and giggling with some of the brightest and most brilliant and beautiful and bad-assed women on the interwebs. I left uplifted and inspired and more than a little in love with my community.

Then Air Canada messed up my flight connections, and I deflated a little. Then they lost my beautiful red shoes – along with the rest of my luggage – and I deflated some more.

Then I got home and Jasper started struggling to breath and had to be rushed to the hospital – again, again - and my husband raced off with him while I curled up with the girl and my heart was punctured in so many places that I didn’t so much deflate as collapse in a tattered mess and Houston and Mom 2.0 and all the glitter and rainbows and bacon-wrapped-shrimp taco awesome of that space receded utterly and – this is, of course, entirely predictable and fully banal – I felt scared and alone and I cried.

I knew that everyone was still there, of course: this is the magic of our community, that we are always there, that there are always virtual hands at the ready to catch us when we stumble. But there are, still, moments when virtual hands are not quite enough – when they feel like spectres, shadows of the real thing – and one’s consciousness of that – one’s sense-memory of holding real hands and the betterness of that – overwhelms and one is overcome by the deep, deep need for the warmth of real flesh and one wishes for actual touch and the remoteness of that wish provokes a sadness that echoes deep in one’s heart.

(I’m not ready to write – I do not, right now, want to write – about the ugh and the oof and the shake-fists-at-heaven do-not-wantiness  that are provoked by one’s child undergoing recurrent episodes of struggling to breath. Jasper was able to come home this morning, and the immediate danger is passed, so the fear is less intense, but I feel so beaten down by it, this fear of breathlessness, and I am tired and I just want to spend a few hours telling my self that it’s all okay and not that bad and what were we worrying about anyway, even if that might involve some lying, so.)

Alexander McQueen died this week. He committed suicide, and he did so, in part, it seems, because of his bereavement over the death of his mother earlier this month.

This is going to sound awful, terrible, extreme, insane… but… I think that I know – maybe, a little bit – how he felt.

I didn’t contemplate suicide when my dad died, but I did contemplate death, closely and more personally than I had ever contemplated it before. As I flew home to deal with his death – as I struggled with finding myself, suddenly, living the nightmare that had haunted my childhood (because this is the horror of losing a parent: you become a child again, and that child’s worst fear comes true, and her source of comfort is gone and she becomes lost and it is the stuff of nightmares and it is bad) – I thought, more than once, I could die now. This plane could plummet to the ground and I could die and it would not be a terrible thing, because at least then I would know, I would go to where he had gone and I would know.

I was aware that this thought was disturbed, that it was wrong, that I did not want to die, but in those moments – and, truthfully, in some moments since – I thought – I have thought – of death differently; I have thought of it more intimately; it has something to do with me, now, and I cannot turn away from it, and if it ever came too close… I don’t know that I would run so fast to escape it.

I’m not suicidal. I can’t stress that enough. My life has been challenging of late, but I still love that life. It is possible to be sad, to be overcome by grief, and to still appreciate joy. I still appreciate joy. My life is filled with joy. But contemplation of death, in light of death, is not necessarily a rejection of life – sometimes, it’s just a yearning for what has been lost, an aching temptation to push aside the curtain to see what’s on the other side, so that one can know, one can see for one’s self, that it’s all okay over there, that it’s good, that it’s somewhere we might want to be. Because how else can we tolerate the loss, without clinging to a belief – no matter how tenuous – that what – who – we have lost has not disappeared but gone somewhere good, somewhere better, somewhere we might go, too. Will go, someday.

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size…

I wonder if it hurts to live –
And if They have to try –
And whether – could They choose between –
It would not be – to die –

– Emily Dickinson, I measure every Grief I meet.

It does hurt to live, sometimes, when you’ve lost someone you love, someone you needed, someone who was a permanent fixture in your life, someone who you’ve never lived without, someone who was ever-present, eternal, always. It hurts to live because your life becomes suddenly different; the landscape changes so that you no longer quite recognize it; you move forward, disoriented, motion-sick. It doesn’t mean that you give up on life. It does mean that you live in a different relationship with life.

This is complicated for me, because I was convinced, for some time after my father died, that he had committed suicide. When I got the phone call, when I got the news, when I collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath, clutching at my shattered heart, this was my thought: why, Daddy, why? He had come close to suicide many times in the past, but he had promised me that he wouldn’t do it, that he couldn’t bear to hurt us that deeply, and although I believed him, when I got the news of his death, I was convinced: he’d decided that he couldn’t go on, he was in too much pain, it hurt too much to live. And so I spent many hours, many days, trying to reconcile my heart to this, to his pain, to his choice, and I got to a place where I thought that I could understand his choice, and his death having been a choice, something that he wanted, became something that was a source of some comfort.

It was determined, some months later, that he hadn’t taken his own life, but by that point I had come to that conclusion on my own, simply by sorting through the mess of his death and the disorder of his life and by asking painful questions of the people who had found him (had he fallen? where? how? did it seem sudden? oh, my heart) and, of course, by the undiscovery of a note. He would have surely written a note. He had, in fact, written such a note, which I found among his things, but it was from years ago, from a time when I hadn’t even known he was depressed, from a time before he made promises like, I won’t take my own life, sweetheart.

It hurt him to live, but live he did, until he didn’t, and in the aftermath of realizing that he had not taken his own life I was left to figure out how I felt about the fact that his death had not been his choice, that he might not have wanted it, that he might have, in his last moments, been anxious and afraid and worried that I would think that he had taken his own life. It felt bad. Ironic, that. Painful, that.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. Beyond this, anyway: that when I read that Alexander McQueen had taken his own life, and that he had been grievously bereaved, gutted over the death of his mother, I thought, oh, I know, and I thought, people will say that this is strange and twisted and extreme and maybe it is those things but maybe, also, it’s not. From where I’m standing, it’s not. It’s just where someone might land when it hurts to live. It’s terrible that it ends, in his case, in another death; terrible, terrible. But such terribleness is not necessarily madness.

It’s just grief. The worst grief. Rest in peace, sad boy.

(Closing comments, again, again. I’m so sorry, I keep doing this – it’s not that I don’t love our discussions – it’s just that, I’m still sick, and this is too heavy.)

I’d thought that I’d had my fill of beating myself up yesterday, what with blaming myself for Jasper’s pneumonia and all, but really, there’s no such thing as too much self-flagellation when you’re a mother, is there? After a brief flirtation with self-forgiveness that lasted, roughly, the duration of the season premiere of Lost, I’ve regressed fully back into guilt and self-loathing, and it has more than a little to do with the fact that tomorrow, I’m leaving my sick little boy and flying to Nashville.

Which, I wouldn’t do if he weren’t improving and if my husband weren’t going to be around to take over the role of primary caregiver, but still. I’m leaving him. I don’t want to leave him, but I also kinda do. I haven’t had a break since my dad died, and that, well, that wasn’t so much a break as it was a giant, gaping tear in my heart-mind continuum. And the idea of a day or two of not being the Captain (and First Mate, and deckhand, and cook, and scullery maid) of the Good Ship Our House is just so, so, so compelling. That, and this is my work – work that I take much pleasure in, such that it will feel like a holiday, but still. I want to go. I’m going to go.

But I feel guilty as hell.

(Closing comments. I don’t want to crowd-source the question of whether or not I should go. I am going to go. I need to find my own way to feeling okay – as okay as I can feel – about that.) (And yes, I know that I crowd-sourced reassurance over my guilt and anxiety yesterday, and comments are still open over there if you want to weigh in on the question of whether mothers are always hard on themselves, even though I’ve just answered that very question here, in spades, and so it’s really just moot. BEHOLD, I RAMBLE NONSENSICALLY.)

Jasper goes to playschool a couple of days a week. He loves it – loves it – and he knows exactly what days he’s scheduled to go. He toddles down the stairs on those mornings and heads straight for his coat and boots, which he tries to tug on over his pajamas.

SKOO! (School!) he yells. RUSSELL! ELLA! (friends) GO! GO! GO!

Yesterday was a school day. He’d been up throughout the previous night with a cough, and he’d felt a little warm at times the day before, but there are always bugs going around this time of year, and he seemed okay in the morning, and in any case, there he was, clutching his coat and boots and yelling skoo!

I hesitated, for a minute, maybe two. He didn’t feel warm, but he did have a cough, and he had been so, so sick before Christmas… but no, he wanted to go. And I wanted him to go. I had work to do. So I took him to school.

Some hours later, my phone rang, and the voice on the other end was a little panicked. Could I come right away? Jasper wasn’t well, he was hot, really hot, sweating through his clothes, his temperature 105 and climbing, and obviously in pain, and coughing, badly. I dropped what I was doing and ran straight there, not bothering to put on socks or scarf or hat or gloves, not stopping to lock the door, not stopping for anything. I just ran. And as I ran – the very short distance from where I was to where he was – I berated myself a hundred times with every step. I should have kept him home. I shouldn’t have taken him to school. I shouldn’t have let what was convenient and easy trump what was right.

We spent hours at the hospital last night with our sick little boy. I spent hours worrying and fretting and, occasionally – as when they pulled him from me and, while he called out for me desperately with broken, cough-ravaged cries, bound him in a plastic tube and x-rayed his chest – crying. Pneumonia, the doctor said. It might be pneumonia – there’s certainly another respiratory infection – his lungs aren’t clear – we have to treat him for pneumonia.

I know that if I’d kept him home yesterday, it wouldn’t have made any difference. His lungs have been compromised for a while, and the development of pneumonia this time around wasn’t something that I could have prevented by watching over him. But still, but still. He’d been sick – he’d been getting sick – and I suspected as much and still I let him go. Still I let him go.

I lay with him in the wee hours this morning, listening to him rasp and wheeze and cough and I pressed my face into his hair and I promised him, never again. But even as I made that promise, I knew that I might break that promise, that I would break that promise, that I wouldn’t always know when I should be worried and when I shouldn’t be worried, that I would always be caught between the impulse to worry and the need to just let worry go and to forgive myself for letting go of worry because living in a state of worry is just no way to live.

And my heart ached.

Why is this so hard? Do we ever get comfortable with it being so hard? Or is parenthood just one long exercise in coming to terms with one’s own unreasonable expectations of one’s self, with one’s lack of control over all of the things that it seems so necessary to control if one is to protect one’s heart, with anxiety, with worry, with fear?

Must it always be true that our joy – our love for our children, our delight in our children, our pleasure in putting them in sunglasses and having them do parodies of Horatio Cane – is always shadowed by fear? Do we ever really become fearless? Do we really want to?

Can our hearts, will our hearts, (should our hearts?) be ever at ease?

My husband had a vasectomy last year. There was a lot of discussion around it – another baby would not have been unwelcome, and so I wasn’t eager to close off the possibility – but we both knew that it would be madness for me to risk repeating the more or less pretty awfully terrible anxieties and stresses and mental and physical health concerns that I endured in my pregnancy and delivery and post-partum experience with Jasper. “You can’t go through that again,” my husband said, repeatedly, last spring. “We can’t go through that again.

He was right, of course. The pregnancy with Jasper wreaked havoc on my mind and body, as did his birth, as did the post-partum aftermath of that pregnancy and birth. In many ways, I’m still recovering. But still, I have moments in which the loss of the possibility of another pregnancy, another birth, another baby weighs so heavily upon me that it’s difficult to breath, in which the closing off of that future feels a little bit like heartbreak.

It’s a visceral, irrational thing, this feeling – a little bit like thwarted puppy love, like an unrequited crush – I know that I don’t need to have this desire fulfilled, I know that it’s probably better for me to not have this desire fulfilled, I know that the reasonable thing, the rational thing, is to reject this desire and put it in its place, but that knowledge is powerless, in those moments when that knowledge doesn’t stop the desire from pulsing and aching and drowning out everything but the want.

(I think about what we would name this child, I ruminate over whether Emilia and Jasper would prefer a little brother or a little sister or whether they’d care, I push aside the anxieties around another difficult pregnancy and birth and think about that feeling of fullness, I think about how we’d need a new vehicle, perhaps a new house, and then I think about how we couldn’t really afford it, anyway, and about how hard the depression was, this time around, and, really, we had a vasectomy, so it’s moot, this issue, and it’s all for the best anyway.)

And I have another moment, and I think: Beatrice. Oliver. Olivia. Alice. Theo. And my heart flutters, a little sadly.)

I don’t know whether, in those moments – and they are only ever just moments, sometimes protracted, sometimes not – what I’m yearning for is another baby, or just for the possibility of another baby, for fertility and promise and the experience of knowing that my body can do this, that it can grow and nourish and bring forth and nourish new life. I don’t know. I do know that when I look at my children I feel grateful and whole; I look at them and I don’t feel any lack, I don’t feel that anything’s missing, I know that we are complete as a family and that everything about us is good.

But then I have these moments, these utterly destabilizing moments of want and I’m confused. Just, confused.

Does this ever happen to you? How do you make it stop? Do you want make it stop? Or do you just keep your running list of baby names and make it a little game make-believe where you pretend that you have infinite abilities of baby-making and infinite resources for baby-sustaining and you can have as many or as a few babies as you like and you never wreck your body and you never get depressed and your boobs are glorious, resilient fonts of nurturing liquid gold that never ache or scab and you just get to live out the fantasy of motherhood as it never, ever is and then you have a shot of vodka? Or what?

I think that I’m stuck in the denial stage of grief. It’s not that I deny the fact that my father is dead – his ashes sit in a box on my mantle, surrounded, at the moment, by a few Christmas ornaments and my kids’ picture with Santa and Emilia’s bardo-drawing – it’s that I can’t wrap my head around the fact – is it a fact? – that his death is the end, that his life is over, that I’ll never see or speak with him again. The absoluteness of it all, the finality: I’m having trouble accepting this. I can’t accept this. My heart aches from its stubborn refusal to accept this.

And so I flail about, telling myself stories about ghosts and angels and the afterlife. I struggle to grasp onto my old modes of faith, to the articles of certainty – that there is a heaven, that there are angels, that after death the soul takes flight to a world that is – invisible? eternal? – and thereupon arriving is assured of bliss – that carried me through the deaths of grandparents, acquaintances, beloved pets. I read The Shack while I was at my mom’s last week and found myself unmoved, unconvinced: why should I put in stock in some stranger’s account of his weekend with the Holy Trinity, of the reassurances he received from God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit that his dead daughter was fine, just fine,  more than fine, happy, blessed, romping through eternity with Jesus at her side! Why should I be, how could I be, comforted by this when I had no such assurances about my father? What did the experience of the narrator have to do with me? If God invited me to a cottage for the weekend and fed me good food and showed me my Dad communing with Jesus in fields of wildflowers, then sure I’d feel better. Wouldn’t we all? It would be so easy, then.

The point of faith is that we don’t have such assurances. The point of faith is that we believe without such assurances. I know this. I know this.

But I don’t know where my faith is. I want so desperately to find it. I want so desperately to believe, to know, that death is not the end, that it’s not final, that it – my relationship with my father – is not over. We weren’t finished. I didn’t get to say goodbye. There were more conversations to have, more hugs to exchange, more love to express. We weren’t done. He can’t be just gone. He can’t be. He can’t be.

I find myself, too many nights, too many days, reeling from the shock of the realization that he is gone, doubling over, falling to my knees, pressing my fists to my eyes to push back the tears. And invariably, as I reel and fall and struggle, I find myself telling myself that it – this, all this – just isn’t. It just isn’t. It’s not the end. It can’t be. And so I return to the old stories, the articles of faith that used to provide comfort, that could provide comfort still, if I could hold onto them the way that I used to. I tell myself that he must be somewhere. But where? Someone said to me, some months ago, that he’d gone to a better place, and I wanted to grab them by the collar and shake them and make them tell me, where? Where? How do you know? Do you know? Tell me!

I knew that they didn’t know. I was angry that they didn’t know. I am angry that I don’t know. I want so badly to know.

I read an exchange the other day between Jean Vanier and a Canadian writer, about death. Vanier wrote about how he felt when a beloved friend died, how he waited to hear from her, how he waited for some ghostly visit or dream message. “I had hoped that (she) might find a way of communicating with me,” he said. She didn’t. “All I can do,” he concluded, “is trust that she is well.” I too had hoped that my dad might find some way of communicating with me. I tell myself that he might have (I have stories; I am not ready to share them); I look for his messages everywhere, I look so closely that I worry I will miss them for looking. I look so closely, because I don’t quite – I don’t yet? – have the faith that would allow me to just trust.

I don’t know what such faith would look like, exactly. I look to the Bible, I look to the poets. I look to Socrates, who insisted that death should never be feared or mourned, because the soul’s release from the body is a liberation for which it -  if it loves wisdom, if it yearns for the goods that the body and the material world, the cave, cannot provide – strives. Socrates would tell me that I shouldn’t be looking for faith, I should be looking for understanding. But my head is muddled because I am distracted by my heart, my aching heart, and at the moment I can see no more light in wisdom than I can in my Children’s Illustrated Bible and my dog-eared copy of The Little Prince.

I think, part of the problem is, I do believe; there’s a way of looking at what I’ve called my denial and seeing it as faith, as a fervent attachment to the belief that this – life, physical existence, the here-and-now – is not it, that this cannot be it, that death is not an eternal nothing, consignment to dust and nothing more. But the skeptic in me tells me that that – that attachment to belief – is just magical thinking, wishful thinking, and for the life of me I can’t tease these apart or bring them together, my insistence upon rational explanation and my desire to be comforted by faith.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. I hate not knowing.

I’ve decided that the only way to confront this is to really, meaningfully explore faith. I’ve explored – I continue to explore – reason; I spent the better part of my adult life plugging away at the study of philosophy, battering back faith with books. Now I want to let down my guard and see if I can find faith again – it doesn’t matter where – and, if I can find it, see if we have anything in common. Part of this undertaking is banal, and biasedly so: I simply want to find some reassurance about death. I want – I actively want, even though I know that I might not find this, that it might not be possible to find this, that my comfort will derive from something other than this – to be reassured that, as Jean Vanier quotes Rabindranath Tagore, ‘death is not the lamp that goes out, but the coming of dawn.’ This desire is so ordinary, so expected, so given. But sometimes the greatest journeys begin as excursions toward and through the ordinary, as expeditions in search of received truths. Maybe. I don’t know.

I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I’m kind of giving in to the flailing. This will serve me ill, or well. We’ll see.

*deepbreath*

Do you believe in life after death? In anything after death? In some movement of the soul beyond the body, some extension of the spirit beyond the material? And whatever you believe, do you believe it fervently? Or cautiously? Or with with many heavy grains of salt or whatever seasoning it is that tempers flights of fancy, if that is indeed what these are? It’s okay if you don’t believe; I’m interested to hear it. But I also really want to hear if you do. I need to hear if you do. I’ve been afraid to ask. But I want to know.

*apologies to Rilke.

OH SWEET LORD HE SLEPT THROUGH THE NIGHT.

(please gods don’t smite me for celebrating this. please please please and thank you.)

This is what 6am looks like at our house: saggy diapers and ukeleles and big, snot-smeared hugs.

It’s also what 8pm, 11pm, and 3am look like. Yes, he sleeps in those cowboy boots. No, not for any longer than two or three hours at a time.

He’s lucky that he’s got those big, snot-smeared hugs down to a perfectly cuddly art, because otherwise, seriously, there just might be a rodeo somewhere featuring a toddler calf-wrangler and ukelele half-time show.

(Don’t make me tell you that I’m joking, because then I’d be compelled to add a ‘sort of,’ which, you know, will bring out the haters.)

(Seriously, though, people, nothing is working, and although I hasten to stress that this does not make me a bitter, miserable person, it does make me very, very tired, and not a little bit cranky. So.)

(When your child can out-cry-you-out, and the co-sleeping is one long dance of head-kicking, hair-yanking pain, what do you do? Seriously. WHAT DO YOU DO?)