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Colds lead to sore throats. These bring on coughing, which ushers in sleeplessness until finally everyone ends up a tired, weepy mess.
My little ones respond to extreme tiredness by falling asleep approximately three seconds after the lights go out. In contrast, my eldest fights it. “I’m not tired!” she’ll protest, her snarl blending into a yawn before the words are even spoken. “Can’t I stay up and read for a little bit?”
I don’t have a problem telling her no. If need be, I leave instructions with her father to put her to bed early on the nights he’s at the house. But she struggles against sleep so hard that even our best efforts can’t force her to get the rest she needs.
After a full week of sleeping struggles, she was wrung out. Her father had left for the evening. I’d settled in to work, thinking everyone was down for the night. But before long she appeared in the living room with some small issue. I curtly helped her resolve it, then pointed her back toward bed. Within moments she returned, another seemingly minor conundrum on her mind. I was more curt this time. I instructed her not to come back again unless she was bleeding, barfing or on fire.
She didn’t come back. But five minutes later I heard her whispering from the top of the stairs. “Are you bleeding?” I asked.
No, she wasn’t bleeding.
“Are you barfing?”
Negative.
“Are you on fire?”
She began wailing. No she wasn’t on fire, but she neeeeeded me, she sobbed. As I put her back in bed, she sobbed out grief that daddy didn’t live with us anymore. She missed him, she cried. Why couldn’t he live with us?
Lord, I thought. Not tonight. Not any night. “Way after your bedtime when you’re sick isn’t a good time for us to talk about this,” I told her. “But daddy and I were fighting too much.”
“Then why didn’t you just stop fighting?” she whimpered.
Oh if only we could have. “I wish we could have,” I told her.
“What were you fighting about?”
Intimacy, my brain said. Sex. Demonstrating love. Time. Money. Taking care of each other. “Grown up things, baby. Not you, and not your siblings.”
“Grown up things like the economy?” She perked up a little. Her class has been discussing “the economy” lately.
“Yes, I guess we did fight about the economy,” I told her. “Money is something that lots of grown ups fight about.”
“But why didn’t you just stop? You don’t fight now!”
A sudden and unnatural exhaustion hit me. “We don’t fight now because we live in different houses.”
Her sobbing began afresh. “But I miss him so much. I miss him all the time.”
As I tried without much success to soothe her tears, I cursed myself for being so selfish that I could not stay married to her daddy. How much have I hurt these small people, in how many ways, some of which I’ll probably never know? How I wished that I could have held out, held on, put my needs behind those of my children.
Perhaps I should have, to spare them this pain.
*Please, don’t comment just to tell me I’m wrong. Thank you.*




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