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.
Things are getting desperate around here. Like, really.
I can’t remember the last time I slept more than two or three hours at a stretch. I had hoped that my brief trip to Chicago would provide a full night’s sleep, but, alas, I spent that night waking up every hour wondering why I wasn’t being woken up every hour. Which, you know: FRUSTRATING.
The source of the problem is this: wakeful little Jasper and his grabby little hands. The boy has been in some kind of continuous developmental spurt/growth spurt/teething bender/WHATEVER since early September and the only thing that calms him down when he wakes – as he inevitably does, every night – is a fistful of my hair, preferably clutched while his little body – conveniently relocated to the master bed – is wrapped tightly around my head. Removal of legs or arms or fists results in high pitched wailing.
A few weeks ago, I said this about Hollywood’s defense of Roman Polanski:
What message does it send to our sons when the rape of a young girl is dismissed as something that is not that bad? What message does it send to the would-be Donalds of the world? To the would-be Roman Polanskis? To all the boys and men (and, yes, perhaps, women) who would grab and grope and hurt and rape, and to all the boys and men who wouldn’t? That sometimes, it’s okay? And that even if you wouldn’t do it, you shouldn’t necessarily condemn someone who does grab or grope or rape… who? Your sister, your mother, your wife, your lover, your daughter, your child?
I could not have imagined, when I wrote those words, that one might also have added this suggestion: that it’s okay to stand by and watch as a young girl gets gang-raped.
