The other day, I was regaling a friend with a story of the previous night, a rather atypical evening riddled with Aura’s 10 and 11 p.m. wake-ups and then her sudden bout of midnight-timed chatter. “Oh, you poor thing,” the other mother said when I finished. “You must be so tired, not having gone to bed until after midnight!”
Since I have never been one to turn down free pity, I simply nodded, trying my best for the expression all those subjects in medieval martyr paintings have, that half-smile/half-grimace that makes you really wish you named your kid Joan of Arc instead of Aura, the goddess of breezes in completely unsaintly and nudity-laden Greek mythology.
Umm…oh yes. My point: I kind of hedged the truth. I was still wide awake when Aura woke up for the umpteenth time at midnight, probably tooling around on my laptop or contemplating the wisdom of buying black matte flatware.
Nice? Pretentious? Capable of showing every scratch? I'm all for advice.
That’s because I’m almost always still awake at midnight. I love the night, and always have. This wasn’t an easy thing to manage growing up, especially with a chirpy morning-person mother who was a firm believer in a Good Night’s Sleep, Especially If You Want to Do Well Enough in High School to Get into a Good College. But once I arrived at the promised Good College (okay, so thanks, Mom), I indulged. Strolls around campus at eleven at night, forays to the university library at two in the morning, impromptu rides for pancakes hours after midnight…the darker, the better.
And it’s still that way. While I was pregnant, I harbored a gnawing fear that I’d have to change, that becoming a mother would mean that I would finally have to give up late nights, in favor of earlier mornings. Yet that hasn’t quite happened. Sure, Aura goes through phases when she’s rising near dawn, but they’re rare. I realize this is in large part because we have trained her to go to bed a bit later than her peers and therefore also wake up a bit later. And I know it won’t last forever, especially once kindergarten begins. But for now I’m thankful to still have my favorite part of the 24 hours, when the sun finally sinks out of sight and the night stretches before me, complete and thick and somehow full of more possibility than the day ever was.
I just hope Aura is better at surviving fewer than eight hours of sleep than I am. If not, I have a feeling we’ll be having the Good College talk sooner than later. But you better believe we’ll have it at night.
Three months or so after Easter, I have a Good Friday confession to make: I hit a bunny. With my car. On Good Friday.
I’m still not sure how it happened, except that I was driving and then there was a bunny in front of the car, and then…then there was no more bunny. It was as if it just suddenly materialized inches in front of me, in the dark. I’d make a reference to Bunnicula (oh, Bunnicula, how innocent you seem in these days of sparkly vampires and shirtless werewolves), but that seems a little disrespectful.
Anyway, I hit it and it was dead and the entire thing was beyond awful. (And, yes. I turned around on a nearby side street and drove back to check and it looked dead. Then when I went back two minutes later to check once again, this time to make sure it was a bunny and not a house cat that I should report to Animal Control, it was gone, which means it wasn’t dead but close to it, having dragged its little body, fur tacky with blood, into some nearby bushes ohgod ohgod ohgod.)
I’m telling you, you hit a bunny two days before Easter and it is factually impossible not to take it as a bad omen. It’s like plowing into Santa’s sleigh an icy week before Christmas, or accidentally smothering the Tooth Fairy with a pillow.
Plus, hitting a bunny is so much worse than hitting most anything else. For God’s sake, bunnies look like THIS:
The bad news: Unlike with Peter, one dose of chamomile tea at bedtime was not going to cure what ailed this bunny. The good news: Also unlike Peter, this bunny was not wearing a small blue jacket with brass buttons. If there had been one single brass button in sight, I would have driven to the nearest bridge and promptly jumped off it. A dead bunny I could survive. A nattily dressed dead bunny? I’m not so sure.
But back to the omens. While hell has not quite yet raineth down, someone on high has been screwing with me. Since that night, I have had four, FOUR, bunnies run across the road in front of me. Happily, I managed to not hit any of them. Such effort often requires Evel Knievel-type feats of driving, involving much jostling of Aura in her carseat and much screaming from pedestrians. But for now, those four bunnies run unscathed, free to dart merrily in front of other unsuspecting cars.
Therefore and In Conclusion, given that I am putting such effort into not killing bunnies forevermore, I feel that it is only fair to ask the shortest person living in this house to STOP REMINDING ME.
Because, honestly? That green one with the bow tie is starting to freak me out.
Apparently, the planets have aligned, the stars have crossed, and a ritual sacrifice of a Polly Pocket or two (RELAX, one of them was already missing her left arm and the other one bore an off-putting resemblance to Mickey Rourke) has been made, for we have a babysitter. This is a rare occurrence, so rare that Adam and I are downright stymied by how to fill a full six hours of evening. All day, as we’ve been in the car or at the grocery store or eating lunch at the kitchen counter, we’ve been trying to make a plan, yet it’s as if the sheer abundance of options has somehow stifled our decision-making ability.
I think we’ve settled on where to eat, since we finally identified a place that meets both our Date Restaurant Requirements. For Adam, this means the establishment employs a bartender whom he can merrily pester and badger and try to stump with his requests for arcane gins and boutique bitters. For me, this means there is not a child in sight. I am nothing but easy to please. Maternal, too.
It’s been so long since we’ve been out alone that I had forgotten that there is more to Date Night than the Date. Wearing something besides jeans, for instance. I wandered upstairs a while ago and started pushing hangers around and pulling open drawers, ever hopeful of finding a fantastic outfit that I already owned but had totally forgotten about, kind of like happens on the makeover shows except that those people are models anyway and reality television continues to screw with me.
I was rifling through one of the drawers when my fingers suddenly tangled in the straps of something. It was only after cocking my head to the side and squinting really hard that I recognized it for what it was: a push-up bra. After gently removing the layers of dust, I tried it on and found it does indeed improve the shirt I was hoping to wear. There is also a slight chance that it makes me look like an overage teenage hooker, but I choose to ignore that part. If anyone at the restaurant says anything, I plan on knocking them flat on their back with my cleavage. Especially if it’s a kid.
