10.26.06
Although I truly love her with all my heart, I am desperate for time away from my child. How desperate? Let me tell you… I have installed a hook and eye style lock on the OUTSIDE of her bedroom door. I know she’s safe because I am sitting on the other side of that door writing this.
Thank goodness for laptops and wireless internet. My conscience is clear.
Every 2 minutes she yells, “Mommy, I need you!” and I yell back, “Go to bed!”
Here’s the problem: she has decided not to sleep anymore.
I was 32 years old when I gave birth to this incredible human being. So I am dead honest when I say that 6 hours of “alone” time per day is not too much for me. Actually, as a writer it’s not nearly enough. And if I continue to get zero hours of alone time I will go mad.
We’ve reached a point where I am desperate to win. I can picture some parents I’ve known who have given up the battle. The child clearly runs the household and the parent miserably does what she is told. These adults seem to live to appease their children, and the children tend to be, in my opinion, completely out of control.
This can’t happen to me. It just can’t. So at naptime and bedtime Little Miss needs to stay in her room whether she sleeps or not. Until now this has been accomplished with a gate across her bedroom doorway, and she’s been content enough to play on her own when there is no other option. But this week she figured out how to climb over the gate. She is over that gate and down the stairs every 2 minutes, and then needs to be “tucked in” 30 times an hour.
This isn’t working for me.
She is… busy and intelligent and determined and good humored. She manages to make a game out of every type of discipline and consequence I can think of. To put her on time-out is to hold her fighting on my lap until I am exhausted. I came up with one consequence that I thought was brilliant – “Every time I have to tell you to go to bed I will take one of your toys and put it in the shed outside. You may earn them back by staying in your room at naptime and bedtime.”
I explained this while I was taking her collapsible dollhouse outside, and she cried. “A-ha!” I thought to myself, “this is going to work.” Yet in less than 10 minutes she was gleefully pulling toys out of the closet, “Put this in the shed, Mom! Now put my trains in the shed. And my horses!” This is the child who, when I yell in the Mommy’s-had-absolutely-enough voice “GO TO BED,” responds by placing her hands on her hips and saying, “It’s not polite to yell, Mom.”
I am confounded. What on earth am I going to do with this child?
Well this week I’m going to try the hook-lock. I can use the computer or work on her scrapbook just as well upstairs as down, so I’m really not losing any Mommy Time. And once she falls asleep I’ll unhook it. What I’m hoping for, I think, is to get her accustomed to at least staying in her room when she’s supposed to be sleeping. Heck, I don’t even care if she sleeps. That’s not an issue for me whatsoever. But for a couple of hours a day I need her to leave me alone.
Yeah, okay, what I’m really hoping for is to finally win a round.
She challenges me in a lot of ways. But she is also my joy. She has beautiful manners, both at home and in public. She’s having fewer tantrums. She’s mostly potty trained. And she’s getting better about sharing and playing with others. Well, sort of, a little bit. She can learn to go to sleep before I totally blow my top. I know she can.
Sometimes tough love is in order. And locked doors. Cross your fingers for me.
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