Oedipus, Simple!

Lock Up Your... Cats

My son sleeps with my wife. I sleep in the next room -- his! It’s an arrangement that would make Oedipus himself puce with jealousy. There’s a simple enough explanation for this, and no it doesn’t rhyme with divschmorce. The reason: my son is a fucking bully.

My wife and I have obviously discussed the situation. It used to be my job, but now she’s taken the reins of putting him to bed every night. She claims he won’t go to sleep in his own bed. “Mommy’s bed; Mommy’s bed!!!” he demands, when she takes him up. Mommy doesn’t say no, so the kid winds up passing out on my side of the bed.

In the beginning, I’d simply carry him back in. This was about as effective as eating soup with a fork. Within minutes, the child would be straight back in. Lodging himself between me and my wife. I should point out my wife sleeps with about fifty pillows under her head. No joke, she’s practically sitting up. It’s kinda creepy. But it means me and the kid effectively share half a bed, because he’d need a fucking Sherpa to climb up onto her side. One time, after I returned him to bed for the tenth time that night, I went to use the bathroom. An when I got back to bed... there he was, IN MY BED! It was like a fucking cartoon: you know Pepe Le Pew – the skunk who rapes cats... for the amusement of children – when he’s chasing down his lady, and she keeps running away from him, but there he is wherever she hides? It was like that.

So one night I just climbed into his bed, and had the best sleep I’d had in weeks. I know this, because when he came running in shouting “Daddy, daddy”, at 7am, I actually felt capable of functioning like a regular human being, without mainlining a gallon of coffee. Of course, I had a gallon of coffee anyway. I like coffee.

The only person who wasn’t pleased with this new arrangement was my wife. She missed her husband? I kept her warm at night? She liked to occasionally watch me sleep, serene and vulnerable, but still somehow oh so masculine? None of the above. She had nobody to share baby-feeding duties with (and by share I mean get-him-to-do-all-of-them). Conveniently, she soon discovered that whenever our 5 month old awoke, wailing for a bottle and a new diaper, she had to use the bathroom. Every fucking time! “Baby, would you mind getting Eva? I have to use the bathroom”. And I would trudge down the hall to my (old) bedroom like a zombie – an old-fashioned zombie, not one of those terrifying modern, ultra-fast zombies – and feed my daughter at the foot of the bed, while my son and my wife slept soundly.

At least I like coffee.