Bed times

Bed times. I get a racing heart and anxiety just thinking about it. Not my bed time, his.

Bed time is the time of day that my beautiful lovely gentle kind child turns into actual devil Satan Lucifer Damien, every single possessed horror movie child you have ever known. I've tried everything to make bed time a pleasant experience, I've been exceptionally nice, exceptionally horrible, pretended to cry, laugh, ignore him, phone various family members, taken toys away, sent him to the naughty room, sat on the floor in a rocking back and forth state whilst he hits me repeatedly in the head, bites me, kicks me, pulls my hair, scratched my face... etc. etc. etc. If Charlie the cat is somewhere near by he'll get a whack too.

The past two nights I've been revisiting the rapid return approach, for anyone who has god like children or no children then you won't be familiar with this technique, it's where you continuously and without showing any form of emotion or eye contact (like approaching a ferrel animal) return said child to its bed, again, and again, and again, possible for even an hour, or two... three, however long it bloody takes. The trick here is to want the child to go to bed more than the child doesn't want to go to bed. Now it sounds fairly straight forward but fast forward me a few months back when I first used this technique, it was the hardest thing I have ever done. It goes against every built in natural motherly instinct I have to pick my child up and comfort him from the misery I was inflicting on him, it felt fiercely unnatural to show my child no emotion and to ignore his crying, my boyfriend repeatedly told me he was basically taking the piss out of me and taking advantage of my weaknesses, to which I felt extremely resentful towards him and couldn't believe that MY child could ever be that manipulative and betray our bond like that. Today, right now, I know how much of a little prick that child can be, "what a dick" is what goes through my head now, confirmed last night when he begged me to go for a wee, and I caved for a second and let him, he sat there and squeezed out the tiniest drop of wee I have ever seen. you prick. so back to bed it was, an hour of pacing back and forth between his room and mine, lifting him back into bed repeatedly I was definitely tired out and sweaty but eventually, after the worst and most demonic screams I've ever heard come out of his tiny being he gave in, said goodnight, and went to sleep.

Tonight I thought I'd mix things up a bit, break his usual bed time routine and let him come downstairs after his bath, hoping this would change his train of thought, I was wrong, as soon as the second episode of Rory the Racing car finished, I received my usual smack around the head, so did Charlie the cat. Child got a stern telling off then up the stairs we went. For a while it was the usual back and forth bullshit and then I realised why this hurt me so much, IT WAS THE NOISE, the noise of your child crying is easily the most emotionally draining noise a human can experience. Headphones, whyyyyy did I never think of this before?! in they went, Placebo turned up as high as I could and I felt like I was in a sped up scene of an action film, a woman on a serious mission who doesn't give a fuck. after a little while the penny dropped, if I needed something to break the noise and feeling then so does he. So tonight I made a simple yet beautiful discovery, the sleep playlist on Spotify. iPad on top of the wardrobe, child silences immediately, rolls over and says goodnight. I cut half an hour on last nights bed time, I feel like I've won a war. Thank you Spotify, we will be friends for all of eternity.