I know I am not the only one to dread bedtime. It sits there like a toad, crouching at the end of the day, casting a shadow over everything. Even if you have the best day, its there waiting for me.
This is not to say I don’t enjoy spending time with my child, I do. And sometimes bedtimes can end up being genuinely lovely…, in the end. But the reality is that there is often a meltdown, and argument, and some tears (not always mine) to navigate first.
And its exhausting. Truly truly exhausting. I dread it. And I feel awful admitting that. And there is a part of me that knows this bedtime ritual is fleeting, but its also true when they say that the years are short but the days are long. And the bedtimes are even longer still.
The only comfort I can take from this is knowing that others also struggle. But as the bedtime hour approaches, if its my turn, I can feel the tension rising. I wonder sometimes if its like riding a horse, as you tense and get nervous about some upcoming obstacle they can feel it and start to play up and behave like an idiot, just as you expected them too, which is why you tensed up. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I am sure that happens for me. Not least because I don’t want to play an extended game when its bedtime, whereas my OH happily will. I want to go upstairs with my daughter, get her changed into pajamas, brush teeth, read a book and go to sleep. She however, would like to play an incredibly complex game with multiple rules, and requiring many many bags and toys to be packed, organised, moved around, and generally just stall bedtime for as long as possible.
And so the frustration grows. And the pleas to ‘just brush your teeth!’ get louder, and the resistance increases, and a tiny bit of me just dies inside wondering why I am constantly battling with my sweet 5 year old, who turns into an absolute goblin at bedtime.
I don’t have a solution for this yet, only to tell myself that probably sooner than I would like she won’t want me to cuddle with her in bed, to hold her hand, to play with her, to craft with her, and that I will miss it when that is the case, as much as I miss some of the baby days too now that they are a faded fuzzy romanticised memory. But for now, we keep going, breathing an internal sigh of relief when you get a blissful hour or so when its not your turn to do bedtime and to just be.