thematically fickle

When Ruby was exactly 4 months old she began sucking her thumb and sleeping through the night. I’m not bragging about the sleeping thing, just stating a fact pertinent to the story. I have come to learn that when parents engage in the sleep conversation (as in “does your child sleep through the night yet?”) unless one of the parents is extremely competetive and ruthless, neither really wants to know the answer. On the one hand, when I’m asked this question and I answer “no, she still gets up four or five times a night” as was my answer during the months before Ruby found and fell deeply in love with her right thumb, I often got condescending pity from the parent on the other end who would then proudly notify me that his/her child had been sleeping through the night since conception. Which in turn left me pissed off since I was still struggling to maintain sanity on 4 non-consecutive hours of rest each night and didn’t appreciate the glare of their perfectly uninterrupted REM sleep. On the other hand, if I answered as I can now (should I choose to be so cruel) “she sleeps 12 hours a night”, I inflict a direct hit to the parent on the recieving end of the inquisition who inevitably has a two-year-old who has yet to experience a night without waking multiple times. It’s a losing battle for all parties so I usually recognize the trap, politely reply “she’s a pretty good sleeper” and go on about my bidness.

At the same time my girl began to be a pretty good sleeper, she began drooling. I’m not talking about just a little bit of saliva but puddles and puddles of the stuff streaming from her face like Marv Alpert lusting after a young and lithe trapezius. Almost every picture we have of Ruby since this time includes a glistening rash-covered chin and a string of drool billowing in the wind three inches below her face. And each parent or grandparent or child development expert we ran into would say things like “she must be teething…” or “is she teething?” or “does she have a tooth yet?” We finally decided that yes, yes, she must be teething because if all the veterans say she’s teething then YES! she must be teething. But until last week, at the age of 10 months, two weeks and 1 day, Ruby had not a single tooth and I’d already negotiated the when-do-we-take-her-to-a-dentist-for-prosthetics conversation with Sam as I’d neurotically convinced myself that she’d be the first human to never grow teeth.

So last Tuesday she got her first tooth and it’s arrival was rather non-eventful aside from my own personal glee. It’s really just a shard of a thing that clanked against the side of her silver cup that morning but which she’s already using to deftly grate string cheese. People have inquired about the drama of tooth arrival but we try to downplay the absence of crying or fussing. Absence, that is, until four nights ago. Since then, we’ve been getting up four and five times each night to soothe, cuddle and medicate our screaming baby.

And each time she wakes up, even though I know how lucky we are in the sleep department, I feel a wave of resentment overtaking me as if she’s intentionally doing this with the singular goal of pissing me off. I took the disruption of sleep on Wednesday night very personally because it was the first night in about two weeks that I fell asleep without Mama’s Little Helper. But in my haze of pissedoffedness, I managed to locate my happy place.

My solace rests in the vengeful knowledge that her dark-thirty crying extravaganzas, in all liklihood, keep the next door neighbors awake too. And after having them, The Mullets, wake me every morning for the past four-years with their deplorable parenting techniques such as screeching “WHY DID YOU PUT YOUR PANTS ON BACKWARDS, YOU LITTLE FRRRRRRREEEEEEAK! YOU LOOK GAAAAAAAYYYYYY!” to their 6 year-old, I find comfort, nay happiness, in being their alarm clock for a change. I’m ashamed to admit it lest the lightneing bolt of Karma strike me down but last night I actually regretted, for one miniscule seam of a second, that our child doesn’t wake in the night more often.