Of sleeping... and swearing!

The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest
And the creatures who crawl, run and creep.
I know you’re not thirsty. That’s bull***t. Stop lying.
Lie the **** down, my darling, and sleep…

Not my lines, but lord, how I wish they were. Novelist Adam Mansbach, exhausted with trying to get his daughter Vivien to sleep, wrote the longish, cathartic poem Go the F*** to Sleep. While it rhymes like a children’s picture book and is drawn by Ricardo Cortés to look like one, it is not to be read out to your child. Not unless you want her to grow up with the vocabulary of a truck driver. Because this best-selling ‘children’s book for adults’ generously uses the F-word about kids’ reluctance to fall asleep.

I can see your raised eyebrows from here. The thing is, till you have tried to put a reluctant child to sleep, you have NO IDEA how tough it is. Most young parents learn – the slow, hard, humbling way – that kids have their own body clocks. It takes you two years or so to recognize this and officially give up hope. You may have dinner plates to wash or a cure for cancer to invent or your limbs may be falling off from sheer exhaustion. But baby refuses to shut shop till she wants to. There are still has so many toes and fingers to play with, and so much of your hair to pull. It’s enough to make you want a village to raise your child with!

Sleep patterns vary. Some kids sleep at 8 pm and wake up shiny-faced at 6 am. Some young debauches bounce off the walls till 12 am and then crash, only to come around at about 10 am the next day. Mine sleeps late and wakes up early. At 11.45 pm, when my eyelids start to close in the middle of some story she is telling me, she pulls them apart so I can pay her more attention. At an obscene 6.45 am, she’s up again (only on holidays), having remembered something she forgot to tell me last night.

Sleep deprivation, I have realized, is a fairly refined device of torture. A friend’s mother who had two kids in quick succession spent the next few years waking up at night for this one’s feeds and that one’s pee. She thought she would never ever sleep again, that her life would pass by in a miasma of tired sleeplessness. Or what Mansbach calls ‘…the frustration of being in a room with a kid and feeling like you may actually never leave that room again...’ Imagine, then, having twins or triplets.

As they grow, the exploration is more verbal. My kid isn’t obsessed with her toes any more; she is asking questions. How did cavemen have babies – there were no doctors to cut their tummies open, no? Why we have skin? Why are kids mean in class? Why are you mean to me? Can I be an actress? A dancer? Do taps need electricity? I know that the kind thing to do is to retire early, giving her the time to talk through her day. But life has this way of making bharta out of my best intentions, and invariably bedtime is fraught with a tug-of-war between my ‘Go-to-sleep!’ and her ‘Amma-one-last-thing!’

One of our unforgettable bedtime discussions featured this question: what are fathers for? To look after you, I reply, yours feeds and bathes you, no? Frustrated, she sits up. No, I mean before that – the mummy carries the baby inside her stomach. What is the daddy for? So she’s talking biology, I’m talking sociology. And to save myself time, I’m being thick too.

God knows I’m not shy of discussing anatomy. But at that time of the night, sleep and chores tugging at my mind, I want to, like Mansbach, be the bad parent and say, ‘Go the **** to sleep!’