The Hugging Game

Parents of toddlers understand that bedtime rituals can get a little ridiculous. I'm constantly fascinated, amused, and outright baffled by the things Suzannah seems to require before she'll give in to sleep. For awhile, she absolutely had to have her pink plastic comb; she slept with her fist curled tightly around it, and woe to the parents who dared to misplace it. (I still remember the night we couldn't find it. "What do you mean, you don't know where it is?" I hissed at my poor husband as he glanced nervously at our daughter. She was glaring at us, sort of clenching her fists and getting ready to let out a good howl -- until he found the blasted thing in his pocket. So I started making some equally ridiculous rules to accompany my daughter's ridiculous bedtime necessities, like THE PERSON TO GET HER OUT OF BED IN THE MORNING HAD BETTER DARN WELL KEEP TRACK OF THE STUPID COMB.)

Then she forgot about the comb -- either that or we lost it for good, because I haven't seen it around lately -- and began sleeping with an old cell phone. She traded the old cell phone for a pink plastic cell phone that came with a purse she received as a birthday present. (Yeah. My two-year-old has her own cell phone. And yeah, I'm sure that if she doesn't have a real one by the time she enters kindergarten she'll soon find herself in an advanced state of decay.) She actually sleeps with this thing pressed against her face, like she's talking on it. What happened to teddy bears? Oh, except she has a bunch of those, too, and she's never particularly interested in them until bedtime, when she has to hold each one of them up and we have to name them. Yes, Suzannah, that is a bear! And an elephant! And a giraffe! And a moose! And a Cookie Monster! And then she has to stack them in a particular order, and don't think you're going to speed the process along by helping, OH NO. Do you want to see what happens if you mess up her system? Then you can come to my house and do bedtime, and I'll be at the Starbucks up the street reading a book until I can't hear the howling anymore.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought some clippy little bows for her hair. This is actually a Very Big Deal, because Suzannah hasn't even had enough hair for those teeny, tiny, spiky little pigtails that other little girls seem to sport starting at about ten months, but recently, she seems to have grown enough for me to clip some to the side. She's just too precious in them, and since she started wearing them, we haven't had any nice old men hollering, "Well, who's this little fella?" at church. (Seriously. It doesn't matter how much pink we make her wear.) Suzannah tolerates the bows well enough, I suppose, but she rarely keeps them in her hair for very long during daylight hours. No, she prefers to wear them with her jammies -- the more, the merrier. The other night I clipped two of them into her hair, but she continued to point at her dresser and whine, "BOW!" Oh, good grief. So, like any mother firmly holding her ground against such an unreasonable child, I said, "Okay, Suzannah, but JUST ONE MORE." Luckily, the third bow seemed to do the trick. She dropped to her mattress and said, very sweetly, "Nigh-nigh!"

Now, say what you want about all this, but Suzannah didn't actually start sleeping through the night until fairly recently. She was all right after she turned one, but around eighteen months something horrible happened and we found ourselves with something resembling a newborn again, only this child weighed TWENTY-FIVE POUNDS instead of ten pounds, and I couldn't just slide her into bed with us and nurse her back to sleep. For several weeks -- months, decades, whatever -- we dealt with a child who was seemingly allergic to sleep, and didn't mind sharing that fact. Loudly. All night long. I may or may not have hysterically informed my husband that if he didn't get THAT LITTLE OPERATION then I would do it myself, because I was sure I had some nail scissors lying around.

But then one night, she went to bed without a fuss and slept all night long. Until eight o'clock in the morning. And she's been doing that more or less ever since then. Perhaps you can understand why I'm willing to find the plastic comb, have conversations on a pink plastic cell phone, name all of her animals, and fix her hair before she GOES TO SLEEP. Maybe I'm spoiling her, sure, but you know, I don't really care, because -- did you get that part? -- WE ARE ALL SLEEPING. (My mother says, like it's no big deal, "Well, of course, she was at Grandma's house." This is true. We were visiting my parents for Spring Break, and I thought, great, at least she can play with Grandpa and Grandma while I take a nap or two, but it turns out I didn't even need to. Because we all. slept. all. night. And for some miraculous reason, she found that sleeping-all-night thing to her liking, so she kept doing it even after we came home.)

There's one part of Suzannah's bedtime ritual, though, that isn't ridiculous. We call it The Hugging Game, and it started before one long night of sleep deprivation. Despite my sincere belief that I'd never sleep for more than 90 minutes at a time ever again, I wanted to laugh because we're parents to this hilarious child, this little golden miracle, and we could talk about her all night, about how much we love this, about how the sleep deprivation will not kill us and is, in fact, worth every moment because do you know what she did? She made us sit on the floor and she hurled herself back and forth between us, giggling, throwing her arms around our necks and resting her cheek against our shoulders before tossing herself into the other's arms. She still does this. Tonight, she ran into the room where my brother stays when he's here, calling "Ain! Ain!" and led him into the living room, where we sat on the floor in a circle, and she took turns hugging all of us tightly, murmuring "Hug!" each time. Finally, I said, "Okay, Zannah-bean, one more time!" and she hugged us all again before trotting off to her room, where all she required was a drink of water before curling up and saying, "Nigh nigh!"

I take back the bit about the nail scissors. I can't imagine not doing this all again. And it chokes me right up to think about it, later, when she's sleeping with her little fist curled lightly around whatever random thing she insists on taking to bed. I think about this girl of mine and about this life we're navigating together, and I think about some time in the future that seems so distant now but will be upon me in an instant, when I will remember nights like this -- lying in my husband's arms, talking about the hugging game, and wanting to preserve the now of my life in all its uncertain beauty.