Don't believe the bedtime hype!

You don't have to like it -- or think you should like it

There’s a new Cut article about why SOME parents hate putting their kids to bed. At first, I didn’t want to read it because…

I did read it.

I’m glad author Elizabeth Passarella put it out there that some of us lose our shit occasionally during especially rough bedtimes (I have once maybe said something like, “You are STEALING from me!!”)

But I don’t think it should be a very hot take that a few weirdo parents don’t like putting their kids to bed at the end of the long day.

Of course, as you can imagine, there were plenty of people in the comments asking, “What type of asshole mom doesn’t cherish putting her kids to bed?”

🙋‍♀️

In truth, it’s gotten a lot easier at my house in the last few years.

Nowadays, our 11-year-old can and will put himself to bed some nights, although we still do bedtime with him so we can read to him and remind him to change his socks. He is more chill than the days when he wanted to roll around on the floor before bed with his dad or run around naked and make his little brother look at him with a delighted fascination, a facial expression that read, “I want in on that.”

The 8-year-old one has come really far as well since we caved and started doing melatonin. Say what you will, but it works for us—it quiets those nighttime anxiety thoughts that used to make him get speedier and freaked out the more tired he got. He stays in his room instead of popping out of his room to tell us he’s worried that maybe he didn’t wash his hands correctly and a germ got in his mouth and he’ll get sick, or those early years when he used to pop out of bed and turn on the lights and our bedroom while we were sleeping and go “HA!!”

Plus, they can shower themselves. They can brush their own teeth and put on their own pajamas.

Even still, I am 10-12% happier the days when I know for a fact that someone else is putting them to bed¹ and that the hours from about 7-9 PM belong to me and me alone.

I joke that bedtime has a great P.R. person who paints a child’s bedtime as something like this:

Instead of like this:

Bedtime’s press person probably works for the same firm as Big Dinner. Beware false advertising!

It shouldn’t be weird for a mom not to look forward to bedtime, an essential yet often byzantine parenting act at the most tiring time of day. It’s not just about the act of getting them to sleep on time. Even if you nail it and the kids are in bed, there’s that uneasy wonder whether, for the next few hours, you should flop on the couch, Do Things, focus your attention on your partner (who maybe got you into this mess in the first place), or even more tempting, go right to bed after the kids do.

And if it is one of those rough nights where your kids get crazier instead of quieter, pop out of bed, holler from their rooms, discover urgent fears that they never mentioned before this night at 9 PM, have accidents the second they get horizontal, play clandestinely, not only are you already fried, you start thinking about your exhaustion balance growing exponentially. The kid won’t sleep, maybe its sibling won’t sleep, you won’t sleep, then you’ll all be tired tomorrow, and the kid will be a turd at school, and you’ll hear from the teacher, which will interrupt your work day and then at the end of that next day it’s bedtime again and oh god.

As always, the threat of “You’ll miss this someday” looms over like a punishment for failing to be sad that we’ll be away from our children for some hours while they’re unconscious, for not having enough energy to be as patient at 8 PM as at 8 AM, for having remnants of those sundowning feelings of dread from the early newborn days when you know nighttime brings more than one kind of darkness.

But that threat doesn’t make bedtime sweeter. I don’t think you “miss this” anymore or less if you like it or not. And of all the things that can damage a child, their parent putting them safely to bed and not liking it cannot be one of the top contenders.

I hope if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know already that it’s canon that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether it’s wrong not to like bedtime, want your own time, or even want your own sleep.

But maybe some of you need to hear it again or for the first time.

If someone tries to make you feel bad for not loving bedtime, feel bad for them for not having anything better to do after the kids go to sleep.

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One witchy thing

Text thread with a friend who got a wonky mammogram result:

1. Ever come home late from a night out, and the sitter failed to get the kids into bed, and you’re tempted to refuse to pay or even demand they pay you?