Bedtime

One day, when you’re a kid, you figure out that being an adult is difficult.  Up until this day, you think car ownership, staying up as late as you want and telling kids what to do all day is all it takes to be a grown-up.  The adults in your life make you go to bed early, don’t give you enough money and aren’t happy all the time because they aren’t doing it right.  When you’re an adult, you think, you’ll do it right.

Then it hits you.  “I remember the exact moment when I realized I’ll have to owe people to get things,” one of my friends said.  “From now on I’ll have responsibilities and life will be complicated, I thought.  I’m going to have to work at being grown up.”

I figured it out and for the most part went along with the deal.  When you move out, you don’t have bills, laundry or shopping done for you, but you don’t have to be under someone else’s house rules.  You can stay up for as long as you want.

For me this was a fair trade-off.  I decided I didn’t mind working all day if I got to go out at night.  It was worth getting up in the morning for work if I knew I didn’t have to come home and go to sleep by a seemingly arbitrary curfew.

I’ve agreed to this exchange of freedoms for years.  I pay my bills, I go to my kids’ concerts and even to their dumbass back-to-school nights.  I even pretend to be like the other parents at these things.  I sit in the kid-sized desks and raise my hand to ask smart-ass suck-up questions of my kid’s English teacher like the good parents sitting in little desks all around me.  I don’t make sarcastic comments or jokes unless I know only my husband can hear them.

Then I go home and stay up until way too late.  I notice I stay up even later when I’ve done these good parent things.  I have to balance it out.  I can only take so much of this rule following thing.

When I returned home from back-to-school night, for example, Charlie and I stayed up until at least 2:00 am watching the Karen Carpenter story on E!  I had to do something to wipe the fake smile off my face.  I like watching anything about eating disorders anyway, especially with Charlie.  He starts feeling sorry for me and rubs my feet.  I don’t tell him I’m about as close to getting anorexia again as he is.  He might stop rubbing my feet.

Even though we have a small couch, it’s big enough to tilt my head, close my eyes and semi-comfortably fall asleep on.  I feel completely guilt-free about this.  It’s okay; I’m an adult.  I pay my bills.  I can do whatever I want in our own homes at 2:00 am.  I could be doing a lot worse things than sleeping on a crappy texture-coated Goodwill-reject couch watching Karen Carpenter starve herself.

My ex hated falling asleep on the couch.  It was a sin, like he broke one of the ten commandments, except he was an atheist.   He could con relatives and kids and good people out of thousands of dollars guilt-free, but falling asleep on the couch bothered him.

Charlie doesn’t fall asleep on the couch.  He watches the History channel instead.  As soon as I fall asleep, he flips over to channel 37 and watches the history of barbed wire for the third time.  I don’t know how he stays awake.

When Charlie’s had enough barbed wire knowledge, he decides it’s time to go to bed.  He’s got a system.  “First,” he says, “I have to lightly move your shoulder and say, ‘I’m tired.’”

I don’t move.

“Time for bed,” he says.

I look over at him with one eye closed and say, “Five more minutes.”

We loop through this cycle about three times before I say, “Okay.”

There’s been only one time I can remember when I went to bed at a normal, responsible time.  I started to get comfortable and feel my eyelids getting heavy when Charlie said, “Jill, there’s a bat in the room.”

I looked up, saw something flying in the dark and bolted upstairs.  I slammed the door, in case the bat decided to follow me.  I like slamming doors.  It’s like putting a period on the end of a sentence.  A slammed door is not a mixed message.

I felt bad about leaving Charlie with bat duties, but not bad enough to open the door. 

“That’s the fastest I’ve ever seen you get up,” he said and got up himself to go find the broom.  The snake-eating Discovery cat happened to be inside and with the activity, happened to wake up.  He saw the bat right away and decided not to wait for Charlie to take care of it.

The cat can jump pretty high, thanks to Charlie’s teasing the cat with a shoestring, but not high enough to catch the bat.  I peeked out the door to see Charlie batting the bat with the broom, trying to direct it toward the cat so the cat could do his dirty work.  The cat only got in his way.  The bat was way too fast.

The bat followed me upstairs where it seemed safer.  The cat couldn’t jump up here, so he followed the bat’s every move with his eyes.  He jumped when the bat flew low, but was about five feet too short.

I couldn’t watch.  “I swatted it,” Charlie said on the other side of the door.  “He’s down.”  I opened the door to see the cat pounce on the bat and start to play.  The cat pawed the bat to get it to move.  When it did move, it took flight. 

”I’m back where I started from,” Charlie said.  “This isn’t going to work.”

After a few more swats, Charlie started whining about having to kill cute raccoons at work, which is the one thing he hates most about being a Cop.  “Now this,” he said.

<>“Bats eat insects and they’re very peaceful,” he said.  “He’d have had a good life if he didn’t end up in the living room.  Now I have to do what the cat can’t do.”

With this, he took a good hard swat and whacked the bat to the ground, dead.  This pissed off the cat.  “His toy ran out of batteries,” Charlie said.  The cat looked up at Charlie like, ‘What did you do that for?’

Charlie picked up the bat and put it out on the driveway.  The cat followed him, hoping for the best.  We went to bed without sleeping on the couch first, like adults.

The next morning we woke up to a big fat black crow on our front doorstep.  “The cat gave me a present,” Charlie said.  “Since I gave him a bat, he must have thought the least he could do was give me a crow.”  We left it there for a few days.  We're not that responsible yet.

Being an adult isn’t as easy as it looks when you’re a kid.

A little help? [] 7:12:54 PM