Dad Is Fat (19 page)

Then Jeannie and I can watch television or read for exactly one minute before they all wake up and come into our bed. Curtain.

So how do we have time to
make
all these babies, you might ask? Well, that’s none of your business, you pervert. Why don’t you go reread that dirty book with the tie on the cover? I can’t believe you read that stuff! Scandalous! I’m sorry. Maybe I’m overreacting. I’m grateful you bought my nondirty book. You obviously are a good person … with some naughty secrets. I won’t hold your creepiness against you.

Exactly one million years ago, there was a television show called
The Waltons
. Each episode of
The Waltons
would end with an exterior shot of the Waltons’ home at nighttime. The camera would hold on the house as the family said their round robin of goodnights as the light in the windows went out. Each person in the family would chime in. “Goodnight, Mama; goodnight, Daddy.” “Goodnight, Jim-Bob; goodnight, John-Boy.” This would go on for about a minute. It was adorable; it was sweet and probably the most unrealistic portrayal of bedtime for parents ever displayed in any art form.

Of course
bedtime
is a misleading term. It should be categorized with the word
utopia
. “
Bedtime
” gives the impression that your children will be in bed, going to sleep at a specific
time
. Any parent of a five-year-old will tell you this is not a plausible reality. Bedtime with young children is a nightly crisis. Part of me is relieved that most of my shows coincide with
bedtime, and therefore I have a valid excuse to remove myself from this catastrophic paradox.

Bedtime makes you realize how completely incapable you are of being in charge of another human being. My children act like they’ve never been to sleep before. “Bed? What’s that? No, I’m not doing that.” They never want to go to bed. This is another thing that I will never have in common with my children. Every morning when I wake up, my first thought is, “When can I come back here?” It’s the carrot that keeps me motivated. Sometimes going to bed feels like the highlight of my day.

Ironically, to my children, bedtime is a punishment that violates their basic rights as human beings. Once the lights are out, you can expect at least an hour of inmates clanging their tin cups on the cell bars. They turn against us in a unified protest as fervent as the civil rights marches of the 1960s. “This is unfair!” Before the pajama burning begins, we move quickly into action following the “divide and conquer” strategy.

Part of our bedtime ritual involves Jeannie and I lying down with our kids. We’ll cuddle them, read to them, tell them stories, and eventually beg them to sleep. This strategy always begins as a wonderful, intimate experience and then ends with threats and tears. And sometimes the kids get upset, too. Inevitably it becomes a hostage negotiation, but in reverse. “If you
stay in
there, we will give you whatever you want. What do you need, a helicopter to Cuba? We will meet all of your demands if you
just stay in there and don’t hurt anyone
!”

With five little kids, there is no ending to bedtime. There is always one awake. Like they are taking shifts. I imagine
they have scheduling meetings: “All right, I’ll annoy Dad from midnight to two. Who wants the three-to-six-a.m. shift? Now everyone lie down and practice kicking Dad in your sleep.” Whenever one of my children says, “Goodnight, Daddy,” I always think to myself, “You don’t mean that.”

I love my bed. It was a big investment. It’s a Tempur-Pedic. You may have seen one of their annoying commercials on television where overly excited Tempur-Pedic owners make the appeal “Ask me about my Tempur-Pedic!” “Ask me how fast I fall asleep!” I always want to chime in, “Ask me why my Tempur-Pedic is filled with a horde of children every morning and I’m so uncomfortable.”

This is because my bed, our bed, is a “family bed.” There are two philosophies when it comes to getting young children to sleep. There is “sleep training,” which basically involves putting your kids to bed and listening to them scream all night, or there is “attachment parenting,” which essentially involves lying down with your kids, cuddling them, and then listening to them scream all night. The family bed is an additional aspect of attachment parenting.

Since Jeannie is a big believer in attachment parenting and I’m a spineless coward, we have instituted an open-door policy, meaning if one of our kids has a nightmare, they are welcome to come in our room and pee in our bed. Luckily this only happens every night.

I don’t know if you have ever slept next to someone that has wet the bed, but it’s delightful. You’re asleep, right? So when you wake up, your first thought is, “Oh my God, I wet the bed!” For me, my next thought is, “Well, it’s not
that
wet. I’ll just scoot over a bit. If I act like I’m sleeping, maybe Jeannie will change the sheets.” Some of my finest acting has been pretending to be asleep while Jeannie cleans up the mess. I’ll groggily comment, “Oh, I didn’t notice that. Hey, while you’re up, can you make me a sandwich?”

Sometimes I’m awake when one of my kids will stumble into my room. I’ll be innocently watching TV when I’ll catch
a shadowy figure in our bedroom doorway out of the corner of my eye. It always scares the hell out of me. They’ll just be standing there blankly staring like they should be holding a knife. After I ask if they are okay, they’ll climb in our bed and proceed to complain that I have the TV on.

“Turn off the TV!” my six-year-old son, Jack, will whine. Like I’m interrupting him.

“Why don’t you just go back to your own bed?”

“Dad, turn off the TV—I am TRYING TO SLEEP!”

He’s mostly upset because I’m watching the news. TV news is like kryptonite to children. The two major shifts in taste from childhood to adulthood are news and mustard. Kids hate the news and mustard. Hell, mustard even has the word
turd
in it. Maybe I should threaten my kids that if they don’t go to bed, I will force them to watch an hour-long newscast about mustard.

I love the fact that if my children wake up scared or are feeling lonely, they can come in our bed. I just wish each and every one of them didn’t do it every single night. There isn’t room. I’m not exaggerating. There are seven people in my family, and there has yet to be a bed created in which we can all comfortably fit. I have a king-size bed, yet my dominion is relegated to the sliver on the right edge. One more peasant revolt and I’ll be on the floor. By the end of the night, I find myself longing for my own cot. It could be made of nails, but it would be my own.

I blame Dr. Sears, the advocate of “attachment parenting,” for this. Obviously I love all the intentions of attachment parenting, but often attachment parenting seems to just be a synonym for “Dad will be uncomfortable” parenting. At
this point, I’m in too deep. I can’t just decide now that the kids aren’t allowed in the bed. The younger ones will hold it against me.

I don’t want my kids to want me to burn in hell. I just want my bed back. Jeannie never seems to be bothered by the crowding. She would be comfortable under a blanket of children. Live children, of course.

Before it got crowded
.

I love sleep. I need sleep. We all do. Of course, there are those people that don’t need sleep. I think they’re called “successful.” For me it’s always a little sad getting out of bed. Every morning after I get up, I always gaze longingly at my bed and lament, “You were wonderful last night. I didn’t want it to end. I can’t wait to see you again …”

I am sure everyone reading this book values their sleep, but I am a sleep enthusiast! My dream is to become one of those grandpas in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
who just lives in bed. That looked awesome. There aren’t many things that I let interfere with my sleep. Have you ever been asleep at night and you hear a noise you’re convinced is a murderer that’s trying to break into your house and kill you, but instead of getting up and escaping, you just go back to bed? I guess the reasoning is “They can’t kill me if I’m asleep.” I suppose that would be a pretty embarrassing way to die. That would create an awkward moment in heaven.

Sleep is too important. Sleep can make you give up any principle.

I used to have to negotiate with myself just to get out of bed. “All right, here’s the deal, me. I’ll get up, but I’m not taking a shower. I might be coming back here any minute.” I used to hear the alarm in the morning “
Eee-eee-eee-eee
” and think, “I can get used to that. I’ll just dream I’m in a techno club.”

I gave up my relationship with sleep a long time ago. We had to break up even though neither of us wanted to. What came between us? Kids. Isn’t that always the case? My kids were against me and sleep from the get-go. They gave me an ultimatum: us or sleep. Before I had time to make up my mind,
sleep walked out on me and never came back. Someone should write a country song about it.

Sleep left me with full custody of my children. I’m usually awakened by a foot in my gut or my face, or a foot in my gut
and
a foot in my face. The result is I’m tired all the time. Even complaining how tired I am exhausts me. I’m so tired that the other day I tried to open my front door with my wallet.

Given how resistant children are to going to bed, I’m not surprised that they wake up so early. It’s not just that they wake up early, it’s
how
they wake up. I think
morning
means “speak louder” in little-kid language. My son does not address me in a whisper or even in a normal voice. He bellows three inches from my ear like we are four hundred feet apart. For some reason all my children speak the loudest in the morning. Of course, sometimes Jeannie will get up with the kids and “let me sleep,” but the volume combined with the morning propensity toward temper tantrums makes this generous offer of “letting me sleep” an oxymoron. We have tried letting them stay up a little later so they sleep longer in the morning, but they just wake up more tired, more cranky, and, as a result, more LOUD.