Writer’s Digest Contest – Humor – Honorable Mention Winning Essay – 2025
My anxiety and I go way back. After hundreds of hours in therapy talking about it, often in the third person, I decided to embrace it as a gift, and relabel my relentless over thinking of “what-if” scenarios as being a gifted strategist. Being marginally paranoid had kept me alive to this point, why fight it? I also have a lifetime obsession with getting enough sleep. These two attributes created a consortium and hit overdrive as I was preparing to have our first child.
Since I was planning to return to work after his birth, I knew this precious child was going to be in daycare, so I was very concerned about him coming home cranky if he was unable to enjoy a siesta due to background noise.
So, I embraced my über-mom mode, and formulated a plan for nap training while I was on maternity leave. I left a television or radio softly playing in his nursery while he snoozed during the day, so he would be conditioned to do so with some noise in the background. At night, I reset the environment to silence in his nursery, since he almost always slept in his crib. We did not co-sleep unless the kid was attached to a boob, usually mine.
His ability to sleep at daycare was excellent. The daily report from his caregivers noted how well he slept. Every. Single. Day. Sleeping every day like Snow White after a bite of the poison apple.
Giving myself **way** too much credit for the success of this strategy with our first progeny, two years later, as I was preparing to have our second son, I was committed to follow the same protocol. I was a parenting pro! Just rinse and repeat. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. (Yes, even my private thoughts come through with a southern accent, don’t look so shocked.) Like most other delusional first-time moms, my success with our angelic first born gave me a false sense of accomplishment. Spoiler alert: the second born child is usually slightly feral, despite the same gene pool and family environment. That said, my magical “teach them to sleep through noise” protocol was successful. The real impacts had ramifications for years. Let’s be clear: I overshot my goal.
I hit this sh*t out of the park. It has been nearly 25 years and both of our sons consider sleep their drug of choice. Parenting homerun.
Let’s discuss our youngest son. He started walking at only 8 months old, and quickly thereafter, the little acrobat started scaling the side rail of his crib and jumping from the top of the rail to the floor. He didn’t have the verbal skills to shout “Geronimo,” but the effect was the same. We moved him into a regular twin bed, with a small bumper side rail and surrounded the two sides, not nestled into the corner of the room, with sofa cushions covering the floor in the room he shared with our first spawn. Our logic was to avoid both 1) an emergency room co-pay and 2) an investigation by Child Protective Services. Overall, I would say these two objectives became a recurring theme.
Just before his first birthday, we discovered he was a sleep-walker when he supernaturally appeared in our downstairs bedroom in the middle of the night; with zero response when we spoke to him. He just stood there, barefoot in his Winne the Pooh pajamas, eyes wide open, flat facial expression, in perfect silence, simply staring at us from the end of our bed. F*cking creepy. We were concerned that this precious child, less than a year old, is wandering around the house and making his way downstairs in the middle of the night. Not to mention our shared angst anticipating his perfect timing interrupting “Mommy and Daddy time.”
Please note his three-year-old brother never wakes when this tyke initiates a midnight stroll. Often, I had to elbow my snoring spouse to alert him to the presence of Zombie Tot in our bedroom. At this point it is official: the only light sleeper in this family is myself.
Being problem-solvers, we conducted research and decided to buy a white knob cover when used, claimed “a child’s dexterity and fine motor skills prevents the turning of the knob.” Well, these college-educated, smug parents spent the better part of 30 minutes getting the damn thing on the inside knob of his bedroom door. We kissed him “good night”, left their room, closed the door behind us, and before we made it to the top of the stairs in the compact second story of our home, this kid was standing behind us like a scene from The Shining.
We moved to a larger home as our younger son started elementary school, providing the boys with separate bedrooms, joined by their own bathroom, which would eventually qualify as a bio-logical hazard. In this new home, we installed a top-notch security system, including sensors on every door and window plus an actual siren. This horn is just over 100 decibels, and it was in the attic between their two bedrooms. Sleepy, pre-coffee mom did, at times, forget to turn off the alarm before letting the dogs first thing in the morning, resulting in the piercing shrill of the alarm filling the entire house. The boys slept through it every time. When they do wake, I ask if the alarm scared them, and they both look at me, blinking incrementally with a blank look on their cherub faces, with absolutely no point of reference to which I inquired.
Fast forward a decade, to when our oldest son left for college, and our younger son was a sophomore in high school.
In college, our son has an 8 o’clock class, two days a week. I asked him if he has been getting up one time, and he explained that he sets the alarm clock, and then 6 more alarms on his phone random minutes apart (3 minutes, 5 minutes) because he can “off” an alarm in his sleep so proficiently, he needs redundancy. I am proud to say he has only overslept one class this freshman year! Note it was a 10 am class. Go big or go home.
The sleeping adventures with my youngest continued. I invested in an alarm clock for him with a 103-decibel alarm plus a tethered disk the size of a hockey puck that gets strategically placed between the mattress and box spring (pull your mind out of the gutter, please) that shakes the bed. Literally simulates as if his mattresses are possessed by the devil himself. For reference, this alarm clock’s siren is louder than a crowing rooster (95 decibels), but slightly less than a power saw (106 decibels). My son’s response? In one seamless, sleeping-Olympics qualifying move, he can turn off the alarm, flip over, adjust his pillow and pull the quilt up over his head.
I constantly intervene to get him up for school in the morning. I went up to his room, banged on the door: nothing. I entered his room and actually stood next to the bed, and sometimes even shook him. The third time I repeated this routine, lamenting about the fact it is the third time, he stirred, blinked at me like I was a pathological liar, he has never met, when I appeared at his bedside 20 minutes later explaining the time. I often do this slightly louder than 103 decibels, with a bonus expletive creatively inserted into my rant. And my husband wondered “what I did all morning” before I left for work.
This brings us to our younger son’s senior year of high school. Thanks to his December conception, he has a birthday in early September, and he turned 18 only a couple of weeks into his final year of high school.
Once your child turns eighteen, the world treats them differently. That birthday, although a milestone, does not magically bring the maturity implied.
Once your child is eighteen –
- You can’t talk to the doctor’s office, where he has been a patient since he was born, about what shots he needs for college …because he is an adult
- He can register to vote, and cast his ballot completely upon the premise that “he likes the candidate’s style” …because he is an adult
- He can leave home, be a dancer at La Bare, or venture to Vegas and marry the first girl who agrees ….because he is an adult
Consider that two generations previous, our son, who is too intimidated to drive on a freeway, could have been sent to the front line of an international war directly from high school commencement.
Knowing (praying?) the next fall he would be in college, and would need to self-rouse, I made it a goal for him to be more self-reliant.
I started teaching a yoga class at 5:30 am one day a week. I thought this would force our senior-year son into independence with getting up on time. I see this as a key opportunity, that without my intervention, he will step-up to the challenge. When I teach, I would not return home until after 7am – past his departure deadline needed to be butt-in-seat as first period started at 7:30am. In business we refer to this as a sound theory that failed in practice.
He did a much better job getting himself up for school. However, several times he slept through his loud ass alarm clock, bed tremors included, and this presented a quandary.
After four tardy arrivals in a school year, the consequence is a four-hour Saturday detention for each subsequent tardy. In contrast, absences from a single class period are not a problem until you miss seventeen classes; however, the student requires a parental note for each absence. I will confess, at this point in parenting, the easy way out, which for me is usually the road less taken, beckoned me.
The irony that Mr. Adult not only can’t get himself up, but then I assumed the additional responsibility of writing a note to the school does not fail me. Embracing my inner optimist, I decided to view this as a golden opportunity to be obnoxiously funny. What you may not also realize, is that I have a panache for fiction. I will substitute where I referred to my man-child’s name with the pseudonym Mr. Adult to protect the not-so-innocent.
Below is the actual content of the notes I authored to the attendance office during his final year of high school.
In October, as I came home to my still-sleeping child, I penned this little tomb:
Dear High School Gatekeepers,
Mr. Adult felt bad
Mr. Adult stayed home
Mr. Adult is back now
Go, Mr. Adult, Go
See Mr. Adult Go
See Mr. Adult graduate
Love,
Evelyn
Three weeks later in early November, I was prompted by my little Rip Van Winkle to execute this little work of prose:
Dear Gatekeepers,
Mr. Adult had a headache. Probably from oversleeping.
He is better!
It is a miracle!
Ok, miracle is a stretch.
It is a good thing*
Love,
Evelyn
*with all apologies to Martha Stewart for stealing her line
We did not escape November without a command performance by Sleeping Beauty. I stepped up my sarcasm game and popped off this little number:
Dear Gatekeepers,
Happy Thanksgiving!
Ready for a break? Mr. Adult is. He is late because he was not on time. Headache. Stomach ache. Life.
Bless,
Evelyn
December was uneventful, but come January we had another morning of somnia-overload. When prompted into another sarcasm tsunami by sleepy-head, I grabbed a decorative notepad that was titled, “All things are possible if you believe..“ under which I penned “I believe I’ll have a Margarita … too early?” then added:
Dear Gatekeepers,
Only 121 more calendar days until he graduates! The end is in sight. Early morning light?
Not so in sight today…
Mr. Adult had an upset stomach and is digging deep to find pioneer-worthy fortitude to make it into school, though late.
Peace Like Chicken Grease,
Evelyn
My youngest’s high school graduation I also considered my official retirement as this
precious man-child’s auxiliary alarm clock.
In late April, I had to call the school attendance office, and when I said I was Mr. Adult’s mom, the school attendance office supervisor totally fangirled me.
She said, “Every day we kinda hope he sleeps late because we want to see what you are going to say next.”
Same girl, same.
