Night Mother

I know what inspired Maurice Sendak to write Where the Wild Things Are. It was his mother. In the middle of the night.

To my mind there are three kinds of middle-of-the-night mothers: the stoic, gentle, calm earth mother; the slatternly abusive hellcat; and all rest of us. Statistically I think I'm in safe territory asserting that Maurice Sendak's mother probably fell somewhere in that middle ground between the extremes. And I think she got mad at him when he woke her in the middle of the night for non-essential issues, which include everything except being on the verge of death.

Little Maurice probably was going through his Monster Phase -- and entering his parents' room with a loud bang six or seven times per night for anti-monster reassurance -- when finally Mrs. Sendak went ballistic on him, showing her three-inch long manicured nails and roaring, "Goddammit Maurice! If I see you in this room one more time, I'll show you a monster to be afraid of."

The Night Mother would be horrified by such callous maternal behavior. She would peacefully gather a small, restless child to her calm breast at 2 a.m with nary an eye-roll or exasperated sigh. She would be at the ready with a nurturing embrace, a kind word, a wee hours snack of cookies and warm milk. She would tell a soothing story while rocking a fretful child in her arms with metronome regularity. She would sing lullabyes until her soporific voice grew hoarse.

The Night Mother, naturally, is not real. She is a woman conjured from the depths of "Baraka's" mind; I don't know who Baraka is, but I am thinking she's a mortal woman just like me. One who has issues with middle-of-the-night wakings. Whoever Baraka is, she (he?) has perfectly illustrated the woman I aspire to be at night. The Night Mother (for this is the title of the piece) inhabits a watercolor that hangs on the wall across from my bed. She is draped sanguinely across a bright crescent moon, her shimmering blonde hair flowing over wings of leaves. Her eyes are languid, a hand is draped delicately over the moon in detached bemusement.

Abby, staring at her a few years back on the walls of the yoga studio where she and I practiced downward dogs and snake poses in an effort to excise our anxiety demons, said, "Mommy, she looks like you." I thought that was true, appearance-wise. But still it was hard to imagine that Night Mother sitting bolt upright in bed -- as a sleepy child stumbled into her room at 3:02 a.m. -- pointing at the door in a blind semi-conscious fury, and hissing fiercely, "Get out!" And that's my nice middle-of-the-night greeting.

As that thought struck me, staring at the picture on the yoga studio wall, I became convinced that if I owned the Night Mother I could awaken at 3:02 a.m. graciously, lovingly even. I could arrest the exasperated oath about to part my lips by gazing at the calm Night Mother and, for as long as I needed to, channel her temperance and deal pleasantly with wee-hours eruptions. I bought the painting for $200.

I'd like to say it worked like a charm. I would like to report that after installing the Night Mother, on the wall directly across from my bed so that she would be the first image I saw when I awoke at night, I became a little softer, a little more nurturing at night. But then this would be a boring blog wouldn't it?

Because even the supremely composed Night Mother is no talisman against the sort of middle-of-the-night muddles we regularly find ourselves in. What follows is but one example in a regular pantheon of nighttime brat eruptions: five-year-old Fiona awoke and found herself in the chaise lounge (the compromise location) in our room instead of in our bed, which she had a bad habit (our fault entirely) of wandering into every night in the wee hours. In the interest of sleep, we had delayed the inevitable battle for bed supremacy for far too long. Now the time had come for Fiona to learn that henceforth her parents, and not she, would be sprawled diagonally across the marital bed -- all night, every night.

Fiona, peering over the footboard of the bed and preparing to climb it into a more preferred spot, yelled in a sing-song voice, "Look at the little babies! Lying on this bed and pooping on the floor of the baaaath-roooom."

She went on for a few minutes about how she had not one, but two, bad dreams and couldn't possibly sleep anywhere but our bed, about the monsters in her play closet, about medical explanations of why she needed to be in our bed (butt itches). None of this worked and so she became the verbal prototype for the spammers who are currently vying for our e-mail attention. She launced a personal attack.

"you guys are stupid idiots," she shouted.

We didn't answer. Ben stifled a few whooping laughs and I was frantically and unitelligibly writing her words down in the dark for future use as blog material.

"I wish you weren't my parents you stupid idiots."

I suppose, were we heeding Dr. Dobson and others who think children like Fiona (and permissive parents like us) are at the root of society's problems, one of us should have got out of bed then. One of us should have firmly picked her up and transported her bodily to her own bed, given her a swift swat on the behind, locked the door to our room and drifted off into a smug, sound sleep, confident that we were in charge. One of us should have employed any and/or all of these anti-brat maneuvers. Instead Ben, as he has done with all three of our children when they revert to infantile lunacy, tried to negotiate with Fiona.

"If you go to sleep right now you'll have unicorn dreams."

She replied, "If you let me come in your bed I won't call you any more mean names."

When this attempt at prid quo pro failed, she pulled out the big gun, the verbal barrage. "Stupid idiot losers. I hate you guys! You are the worstest parents I ever had. You're the stupidest people on earth. You're losers and you always lose things. I'm going to throw this book at you."

She picked up Lucky, Alice Sebold's memoir, that is lying at the foot of the bed and she hurled it toward our heads. She scattered the Boston Globe hither and yon.

Cuteness was over after 15 minutes. And by well into the second hour of Fiona's Bed Waterloo I started to feel the blood pulsing in my eyes and I found myself, for about the fifth time in one week, fully and angrily awake before 5 a.m. I directed a quick glare at the fraud Night Mother while launching myself, teeth almost gritted to a bloody pulp, from the newly-recovered territory that was the marital bed. I was way more menacing than any Wild Thing. I picked her up and she suddenly became as rigid as a small length of 2 x 6 lumber. I grimly transported her beyond the doorway of our room, deposited her on the floor with a thump, turned on my heel and locked the door.

"Okay. Okay." I heard a muffled shout from the other side of the door. "I'll go on the chaise lounge, but only if you leave the light on." Incredibly, the child was still negotiating. More incredibly, I was still negotiating.

"No deal." I directed my voice through the keyhole. "I can't sleep with the light on."

After the requisite scuffle with my spouse -- who theorized that she would forever remember the trauma of being uncerimoniously locked outside our bedroom and the end of sweet innocence that this moment foretold -- Fiona did make it back in and onto the chaise lounge. There were a few muttered oaths that may or may not have included the word "idiot", and then, after a full three hours of struggle, she and we fell into the uneasy slumber that follows nighttime turmoil.

But my faith in the Night Mother had been shattered beyond repair. I am always angry in the middle of the night; she never is. The truth, as I've come to know it, is that the Night Mother is a fradulent facsimile of a new-age madonna who is on drugs, most likely some dreamy combination of a carefully selected benzodiazapine and a nice little selective seratonin reuptake inhibitor. It's the only explanation for how she ended up in a catatonic daze sitting on the moon without a spacesuit.