Last night, Gracie began her familiar routine at the top of the stairs after she had already been put to bed. Tonight it was, "It's too dark to fall asleep!" followed by, "I'm scared!" These assertions came after she relieved her bladder, which she was "saving up" until after I said goodnight so that she had a reason to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. I'm not making this up. When I put her to bed, I'll tell her, "Goodnight. I love you. Now please stay in bed--no reading, no playing. It's night-night time," to which she'll reply coyly, "Stay in bed unless I have to go potty." Then I have to resign, head downstairs, and listen for her jubilant flushing five minutes later. She'll then immerse herself in very thorough hand-washing, as if she's scrubbing in before a surgery. She's three, but she's smart.
Her methods of avoiding going to sleep have always been deliberate, clever, and well-orchestrated, even since she was a baby. She was a nightmare to sleep-train; we spent many nights listening to her scream, and on nights when we couldn't take the screaming, our "soothing" techniques looked kind of like those live statue people who make a move like once every two minutes. First pose is with the baby sleeping in the crook of the arm, then shift to awkwardly bent over the crib with the baby on the mattress still snuggled in the crook of the arm, then the sliding-away-of-the-arm maneuver with hand on the baby's belly, then slowly, slowly slide the hand away, then back away one toe at a time, and not a breath until you make it out the door. Then the door would creak, and baby would cry out in her own language, "You tried! You failed! Now get back in here, sucker!" And then it would be 30 minutes more until we made it out the door again. Once Gracie figured out our soothing routine, she actually began holding our hands against her chest when she noticed we were beginning to slip away toward the door . You want to know how to kill a mother with guilt? You teach her nine month old to grasp onto her hand, pressing it to her little belly, so that she won't leave for the evening. It was a brilliant way to buy more time with mommy, and to cause mommy to question if she really had any parenting instincts at all.
Once she was old enough to sleep in her own bed, the unrestricted nature of the twin mattress on the floor gave Gracie a new way to fight sleep. She'd wander out into the hallway where the light spilled out of the bathroom onto the carpeted floor. We'd find her sleeping in the wedge of light more often than I'd like to admit. We dutifully placed her in a pack and play in her bedroom after that for awhile so that she might sleep better. We bought her a princess night light, a fish night light, a soothing sounds machine. Then we were back to crying at bedtime (mostly her, but sometimes me too).
Nowadays, language is a valuable tool for her in her quest for sleep avoidance. She can tell me all the reasons why she cannot and should not go to sleep on time. She also can verbally justify why she hasn't surrendered to sleep, or why the light is still on at 10:30 ("I couldn't find Baby Ashley, and she was crying"). The reasoning becomes more and more elaborate and honestly reasonable. I find myself negotiating with a three year old ("I'm not that tired yet, so I'll read two books and then go to sleep," which sounds pretty good to me by the time it's an hour into the bedtime process and I'm fantasizing about the couch).
Yep, my daughter is a world-class sleep avoider. It's not malicious. In fact, when she says she's scared, I believe her. She is just like me.
I was always afraid of the dark. It takes almost nothing to trigger my imagination; I'm one of those people who believes anything is possible, no matter how irrational it seems. Monsters in the closet? Plausible. Ghosts wandering around my bedroom? Probable. I remember spending many sleepovers lying awake in unfamiliar houses, whispering to random friends and hoping that they weren't sleeping. I remember sprints into the basement to retrieve an item and back out again before I even let out my breath. I remember people in my family talking about encounters with "haints" and praying that I didn't genetically inherit the ability to have tea with some dead guy, or converse with his equally dead mother. The dark always caused my imagination to go into overdrive, usually filling me with fear of the unknown, of the paranormally possible. I don't know if the fear was exacerbated more by the fact that the darkness seemed to impede my vision, therefore reducing my security about what was near me, or more by the fact that the times I was most afraid were times when I felt alone.
When Gracie was at the top of the stairs last night, lingering in the bathroom light and saying she was scared, I had to recall those times as a child where the dark rendered me irrational. I know that in any of those times when fear paralyzed me as a child, I only wished for a person to be there to remind me of what's real and safe. On the other hand, if I've learned anything about fear over the years, it's that unless it is addressed internally and overcome personally, it will only persist the next night, or next time we don't have a full understanding of the world surrounding us. When faced with fear, we might first need someone to step in to hold us for a little while, but then we really need them to show us the tools we already possess to overcome fear. We need to know that we can control it.
I eventually figured out that I could own the dark and overcome my fear when I became a camp counselor. Camp was the ultimate test of the heeby-jeebies. First of all, as with many camps, there were dozens of ghost stories and sightings reported that I believed, of course. Besides the hauntings, there were critters and creatures and an extremely pitch-black walk back to my cabin late at night across a lonely dam and up ninety-seven stairs in the woods. My cabin had no electricity, and lots of mice. Anyway, I began an instant friendship with a mega flashlight that illuminated a fifteen foot circle around me.
My co-counselor wasn't afraid of anything, and he criticized my humongous flashlight because it attracted hoards of moths and ruined his night vision when he was trying to enjoy walks back to our cabins. He told me that my flashlight and I needed to part ways. "Doesn't that, you know, weird you out to be walking in the dark and not being able to see what's near you?" I asked him casually. He said something to the effect of, "Well, we'd be able to see if not for your T. rex of a flashlight." He convinced me to leave it in my back pack for our walks across the dam and up to our village. It turned out that he was right about the night vision thing. I could see well enough to find my way, and it was actually rather reassuring to feel like I wasn't disturbing the universe with 5 D cell batteries worth of light blaring from my hands. After weeks of walking in the blackness of night, I decided to try it solo. I won't say that my heart wasn't trying to leap out of my chest for the first few minutes, but I reminded myself that I had taken this walk many, many times before with a friend. Couldn't I, for the remainder of the walk, be the same girl I was when walking with him? I held on to the thought that I was the same person, and the world was the same, whether I was alone or not. I made it the whole way, and didn't turn on the flashlight for a walk again.
I just needed to know that I had the means to take control of what I felt was controlling me. I needed evidence, and maybe some encouragement, that I was safe regardless of the thoughts that told me otherwise. I needed to see the brave version of me. Surprisingly, she was there the whole time.
I picked Gracie up and told her how brave I know that she is. I gave her evidence from the day, such as when she conquered the giant slide at the indoor play place, or when she repeatedly worked on diving under the water for toys at the pool, even though she's just started learning to swim without floaties. She grinned, because she knew it was true. She is big, and strong, and brave. I asked her to show me her big, strong, brave Gracie face, which caused her to flex her muscles like Arnold and clinch her teeth like Donatello (the Ninja Turtle, not the sculptor). I asked her if we could have a do-over with tucking in, only this time, Brave Gracie would be there instead of Scared Gracie. She readily agreed. For the first time in awhile, if you don't count the stalling after the first tucking-in, Gracie went to sleep willingly and confidently.
I'm not saying that Gracie and I will never be scared again. Heck, I stayed up a full night last week because I saw a brown recluse in my bedroom. But I do know that we both have to expose fear and understand it for what it is: our brains trying to coax us into being comfortable with our imagined weakness. For some reason, it's easy to tell ourselves that we cannot be strong, or that being strong will mean that we'll be hurt somehow. While it's true that being brave sometimes means we're stepping outside our comfort zones, it also means that venturing out into the dark sometimes will make our comfort zones a little bit bigger, a little at a time. Tonight, Gracie might yet again be afraid to go to sleep. However, the difference between tonight and last night is that she now knows there's a brave version of herself that can go to sleep without extra lights and without grasping her mommy's hand to her chest. I hope that eventually Brave Gracie can help her through times when she's a little scared. If not, I'll be waiting in the wings with an extremely obnoxious flashlight.
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