Karma's a Bitch

When I was a kid I hated going to bed.  From the age of two, my poor parents had to put up with me coming into their room in the middle of the night and begging to get into bed with them.  This continued until the age of seven, and probably explains why I have no siblings.   Don’t get me wrong, my parents did try to make me stop.  My mom tried sitting outside my door until I fell asleep, taking me back to my room after I woke them up and finally, as a last resort, locking their bedroom door to keep me from coming in.  It truly shows my tenacious nature that, after being locked from the room I proceeded to sleep in the hallway outside their door rather than go back to my bed. 

Fast forward twenty-odd years and now I have a three-year-old who, for the past fortnight has been coming in to my room at night and waking me up (never his father – apparently my husband didn’t wake up his parents as a kid).  Somehow Prince knows exactly the moment when I have fallen asleep and started my hot vampire dream (you know the one), and that is when he chooses to appear and say so innocently “I just wanted to see mommy.”  How can you get mad at that? How do I tell him he is not allowed to see mommy?  I can’t.  So I wave goodbye to my vampire dream and resign myself to a good hour of lost sleep as I take my child back to his room and try, in vain, to convince him to stay there.  Unfortunately, there is no lock on our bedroom door. 

To top it all off, Prince has also finally, much to my dismay, outgrown naptime.  So not only do I wake up in the morning as a sleep deprived zombie, I don’t even get a chance to catch up on my sleep during the day.  Needless to say, I am now buying Red Bull in bulk at Costco.   

There is a reason why the gorgeous princess in the story was called Sleeping Beauty.  Up-all-night, Hopped-up-on-Caffeine Beauty just doesn’t have the same ring to it.  Plus, in that case, she probably wouldn’t be all that pretty anymore, what with the twitch and the whole no-blinking thing.  Numerous sources tell us that lack of sleep is associated with weight gain, lowered immune function and decreased productivity.  Based on this, in a few more months I am going to be fat, sick and lazy.  Lucky me.  Just another perk of mommyhood I guess. 

Yet the real kick in the balls was when I turned on the T.V last week to find that Jennifer Lopez, mother of three year old twins, had been named Most Beautiful Women in the World.  That is just wrong.  Not that J.Lo isn’t gorgeous, because she is.  But that she is able to be that gorgeous while raising three-year-old twins is just crazy.  I am pretty sure moms of twins normally spend the first five years of their kid’s lives in sweatpants and a perma-ponytail.  She is obviously getting her eight hours of sleep, while I am living off of closer to five, and consider myself lucky if I remember to put on a bra every day.

So where does all of this leave me?  Well, I will continue to fight the good fight of trying to keep my kid in bed all night.  If anyone has any suggestions, I would love to hear them (you can comment below).  If I don’t get some more sleep soon I might end up like Charlie Sheen – I’ll grow out my eyebrows and start making weird animal analogies:  “I got possum eyes, man.”  But on the bright side, I will be sleeping through American Idol from now on so I don’t have to watch that bitch J.Lo rub her well-rested, gorgeous ass in my face.   Plus there is always the hope that Prince will one day have a kid that keeps him awake all night.  Karma may be a bitch, but revenge is a bastard.

-Wendy