For the last month our daughter hasn’t slept through more than one night a week. Most nights, if I’m lucky, I get a three hour block before I hear the tiny voice at the bedroom door informing me she “had a nightmare.” The nightmares, according to her, involve snakes, witches, monsters, spiders and, somewhat less creatively, “the dark.” She refuses to elaborate on any of them. The details apparently remain classified information.
What she does require is physical contact. Immediate, unwavering, legally binding physical contact. She clamps onto my hand like a particularly vindictive clam and will not let go until sheer exhaustion finally drags her unconscious. By that point I’m wide awake, questioning every life choice that led me here and considering intravenous caffeine as a viable medical treatment.
The effects have started spilling into the rest of life. She stopped wanting to attend after school activities. Sports clubs became impossible. She’s quieter at school, clingier at home and generally behaving like a tiny emotionally overwhelmed limpet. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the absolute muppet of a puppy demanding constant movement and chaos, I think she would happily retreat entirely into her bedroom and become some sort of anxious woodland cryptid.
Meanwhile I am functioning on roughly the same level as a malcontented poltergeist debating if blinking counts as power naps. Sleep deprivation is genuinely used as torture and I now understand why. Your brain stops working properly. You become irrationally emotional about dishwasher noises. You eat things standing in the kitchen like a raccoon. You lose the ability to remember why you walked into rooms (not that I had that ability in the first place). I am currently over caffeinated, over eating and operating entirely on spite.
The frustrating part was that none of the explanations seemed true. The nightmares felt too rehearsed somehow, but every attempt to ask what was wrong was met with shrugs, silence or increasingly elaborate stories about monster spiders. We cancelled activities left, right and centre trying to get to the bottom of it.
Then today, after a month of this, she finally admitted that some children at her sports club had been “mean” to her.
A MONTH.
Why could she not have told me this when it started? I could have done something. I could have spoken to staff, dealt with the issue, at the very least directed my rage toward an actual target instead of just stress-eating cheese at midnight.
Naturally when I asked why she hadn’t told us sooner she informed me, very seriously, that it was “a secret.”
Who told her it was a secret?
“Nobody. It was my secret.”
Excellent. Fantastic. Very useful information. Apparently my child has independently invented Fight Club.
And that’s the bit that really hurts, because how are you supposed to help a child who instinctively hides problems? How do you support someone whose first response to distress is apparently “become nocturnal and suffer privately”? It’s heartbreaking because you can see the anxiety spilling out everywhere except the place it needs to.
So at present I have no real answers. We’re trying reassurance, conversations without pressure, gentle encouragement and rebuilding her confidence slowly. Also caffeine. Industrial quantities of caffeine.
And yes, in my weaker moments I do find myself looking wistfully at historical medicine. Victorian parents absolutely had easier bedtimes. Of course they did. Their “sleeping syrup” was essentially heroin dissolved in brandy and optimism. The cough medicine contained cocaine, everything had chloroform in it and half the population was technically being tranquilised against their will.
Tempting, isn’t it?
Raising the Modern Fae 