The Bedtime Wars

I imagine in most homes with small, pre-pubescent children, bedtime is fairly synonymous with struggle. No small, healthy child I have ever met has ever wanted to go to bed, much less actually go to sleep, and I say this with relative certainty, as I have interviewed many children on this topic. Ninety-nine percent of children simply scoff at the idea of needing rest, and would much rather continue to play with their blocks and their toys long into the night and through until morning (and I’m fairly certain the other 1% were a bit under the weather, judging by their runny noses, but who am I to say?).

Bedtime is, however, widely considered to be a mandatory activity for all children, and I dare say for all people, regardless of age, for I’m sure you are all well aware of what happens when one goes to long without sleeping. Your eyelids get all droopy, your hands get all fumbly, your thoughts get all mushy, and eventually you fall asleep at the table and land face-first into your spaghetti. And every well-seasoned veteran of parenthood will tell you that a baby or toddler who has not slept in too long becomes a cantankerous monster with astonishingly strong, mind-shattering vocal chords. So of course, every night at six or seven or eight in the evening, across the world, the United Confederation of Parenthood wages war on the Nation of Childhood, in the name of peace and rest.

Now, on some fronts, this battle goes very quietly. Some Parenthood soldiers say that if you lull the beast into submission with soft music, the children in question will surrender without any tears shed, though I myself have had only mediocre results from this tactic, as it took me several hours of singing the same song on repeat to get the little demon even close to breaking, and even then it didn’t always work. Some parents offer warm milk as a peace offering, though I imagine this conflicts very heavily with the sacred ritual of The Brushed Tooth. A few have even consulted their division of scientists and employed the use of chemical warfare in an effort to jumpstart the enemy’s natural process of approaching sleepiness, and while this has worked with some success, I must stress that this is only a short-term solution, as the enemy will eventual become immune to the medicine’s power and will then conquer the opposing Parenthood soldiers. On other fronts, the battle for rest and solitude may be quite gruesome, as some parents simply leave the enemy to their own devices in some sort of truce, in the hopes that the creature will deplete their supply of Unstoppable Energy and surrender on their own. This tactic, however, requires an incredible amount of resolve, and dare I say down-right stubbornness on the parents part, as the children in question will inevitably yell with glee and make all sorts of migraine-producing noise in their celebration of seemingly having won the battle, not unlike the racket of banging pots and pans. And every child knows that the greatest weakness of any soldier of Parenthood, regardless of age or gender or experience, will always be overwhelming noise, and in all my years as a witness of this incredible, unending war, rarely does a battle go down silently.

Except, in the case of The Battle of Imagination Point.

Now I must caution you, that to use the tactics of this infamous battle will demand much of you, for these strategies require a level of dedication and patience I have not seen in many a soldier in a long time. It will take creativity, resolve, and a certain unknown power every parent should strive to possess. But should you succeed, and I mean really, truly succeed, you may find the battle to be over, for good.

The battle started on a dark, cold, wintery night in potato country. The evening feast had ended, and it was time to begin the fight. The enemy? Three bright children, 8, 7, and 2 years old respectively. Do not let their small, endearing faces trick you, however, for these had been some of the Nation of Parenthood’s most fearsome foes. Their coordination and creativity were unmatched, and they worked together and against each other to create one of the most fearsome challenges I’ve seen in all my days. The soldiers facing this daunting three-headed monster had tried music, they had tried the milk, and they had tried chemical warfare, all with only fleeting, meager success. They were, to put it bluntly, exhausted, both still in their prime and fighting valiantly for the peace their land desperately needed.

But somehow, perhaps from some crack in heaven’s floor or from the fingertips of God himself, a miracle fell from the sky, a miracle that changed the very course of the war itself: a book. An incredibly long, incredibly detailed, incredibly exhausting book. It was as if the angels had dropped the very stars themselves from their pockets and into the tired soldiers open, pleading hands. They scooped up this opportunity eagerly, a welcome tool to turn the tide and bring the battle to a quiet end. Our brave soldiers were meticulous, planning every move of their next attack, waiting until the perfect moment to use their powerful new-found weapon. With the hopes of a surprise attack, the husband took the lead, startling the opposing creature out of its practiced maneuvers, and enticed it into submission. And with the three-headed monster on the cusp of surrender, the soldiers struck the final blow:

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort…” *

Word by creative word, sentence by carefully crafted sentence, the story bloomed into beautiful, colorful life within the children’s minds, and with a single chapter, the offending hoard had been tamed, reduced to sleepy staggering compliance, and with a gentle nudge more, the three small children slipped off into peaceful dreams about wizards and dwarves and all sorts of beautiful things.

Now I’m sure this is when you will ask, was that it? A single night of bedtime stories and it’s over? I can hear the disbelief and desperation in your voice, and I’m sorry to say that no, unfortunately, that was not all it took. You see, while powerful in it’s own right, such a book is just like any other book, or any other tool for that matter: it’s only powerful when you pick it up and use it. So when the next night came, when the sun sank down into the mountains and bedtime arrived again, this well-loved book came down from the shelf, and a chapter or two later found the enemy asleep in their beds, and I imagine our conquering soldiers celebrated happily that night with plenty of ice cream and cookies to go around. And so went the next night, and the next, and the next, and every bedtime after that. Eventually, our beloved soldiers found themselves running out of chapters, and found themselves another weapon:

“Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmers wife.” **

And so the Battle of Imagination Point came to a silent, peaceful close. I still remember the quiet of the snow as the time came each night for teeth to be brushed and clothes to be changed, and the way the three little children eagerly buried themselves in blankets as they waited for the story to begin again. The peace didn’t last forever, as peace rarely ever does, but the sound of the soldiers’ voices weaving stories into dreams has lodged itself in my memory quite permanently. Each night, the children asked for another chapter, and sometimes two, and to this day these silly little monsters think fondly of the day when bedtime stories came to life, and the nightly fight for bedtime came to an end. And still those books sit on their father’s shelf, waiting for the day when the time for bedtime stories will come again.

* J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the first two sentences

** L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, the first sentence