Why Parents Don’t Sleep…Wetting the Bed and Monsters in the Closets.

It was about 12:36 AM when I stood in the boys room trying not to scream. Not succeeding very well. I had tried to rationalize. I tried cuddling. I was now at the state of speaking loudly, “There are NO MONSTERS in this house! There is just me, you, Mommy, and Jackson and we are all trying to sleep and it’s not fair that you are keeping us ALL awake! I’m tired! Stop.”

With tears brimming in my eyes he finally seemed to realize that I was tired and there were in fact no monsters.

The boys were never good sleepers. I got to the point where I wanted to throat punch anyone who asked me or stated to me “They still aren’t sleeping through the night?! Did you try….” because the answer was always no. They aren’t sleeping through the night. Yes I tried that. I tried every damn sleep remedy you can imagine.

Three and a half, nearly four years later, the nights are slightly improved.

There are more full night sleeps. Which almost makes the interrupted nights harder. Now it’s not that they want to nurse. It’s that they peed the bed. This week it was one night of peeing the bed and the following night of waking up screaming because there are clearly monsters in our house.

Now if I peed the bed I would want it changed silently and then I would want to immediately crawl back into bed. When one of the boys pees the bed, it’s a freaking scene. There is inevitably some piece of blanket or animal that gets wet that has to be washed which causes the epic meltdown which means we are now all fully awake.

It’s not an easy clean-up and back to sleep. It’s a clean-up of hell followed by more screaming hell. Followed by all of us eventually back in our own beds wide awake. Then the cat who is now frazzled and annoyed starts meowing and making a scene because she was disturbed.

Then the monsters. They literally watch PJMasks and Dino Dana. Nothing scary. No monsters. I mean minus the dinosaurs, but they are generally not scary.

But my son wakes up with complete confidence that there are monsters in our house and it takes me losing my damn mind to convince him otherwise. The lights are already on. The closets are checked. They sleep with the hallway light and the light in the bathroom on. Tonight I added an Elsa nightlight. It actually projects Elsa onto the ceiling. He seems obsessed with it and I told him it will keep all monsters away.

Fingers crossed.

At some point they will sleep through the night. At some point I will sleep through the night. I can’t tell you when that will be. I can tell you that if a parent tells you they were up overnight don’t ask why the kid isn’t sleeping through the night. Trust me if there was a magical cure that didn’t involve us all melting down at 1 AM about pee on the sheets or the freaking cat meowing or the monsters…I’d be all over that.

And yes. We limit fluids before bedtime for two hours. Try keeping that boy away from the faucet though. He steals cups from his toy kitchen and sneaks into the bathroom and drinks water. Then when he pees the bed and is screaming because we have to wash the towel he’s snuggling with- he wants a cup of water because the crying “makes my mouth hurt and I need water!” So yeah. The struggle is real.

I’ve had many people say, “Just enjoy being up with them at night and all the snuggles because these days pass too quickly,” or some equally quaint saying. I also want to throat punch those people. The days may pass quickly but the nights are torturously bad and long. I don’t know what kind of stuff happened with their kids at 1 AM but with mine, we are not quickly and quietly snuggling then drifting back off into a peaceful slumber.

We are more like a massive cat fight where there is chaos, screaming, urine scented, and at the end we all retreat attempting to lick out wounds before passing out.

I will never miss the chaotic middle of the night scenes. Nor will I miss the epic hangover feeling the next morning but without any fun drunken memories just a hazy recall of reasoning with a three year old about there being no monsters in the house. I won’t miss the dread with which I approach sleep the subsequent nights knowing my slumber could be interrupted at any moment by screams from pee and monsters.

Instead at some point, some night, I will realize I have slept through the night. Many nights in a row. And then I will do a fist pump and think sweet. I survived.

*** My business partner has twins. She told me when they were newborns that I wouldn’t get any sleep until they hit at least six or seven. She apparently wasn’t wrong. To all the twin mom’s out there. Hang in there. Six or seven years….we got this. I’m almost to year four…