MindSpinner

It’s 6:15 a.m., and the text in front of me is still swimming in a pool of blur. The night was long. There was the phone conversation in the next room until 1:00 a.m. There were the bloodcurdling screams at 2:00, the dogs barking at 6:00. And here am I, facing one of those half-dead days that are the special provence of parents. I’ve been at this parenting thing for sixteen years, and I’ve realized I’m now right back to square one: the challenge of ensuring that children sleep through the night.

The essential rule of self-defense is to wake my nocturnal offspring up fairly early even though it’s summer - no later than 9:00 a.m. Yesterday I didn’t do this. If I had, my daughter, for instance, would never have been awake at 2:00 a.m. when the 2″centipede sped across her bedroom floor, inspiring screams worthy of a six-foot cobra or the undead or at least King Kong’s hand bursting through her window.

The centipede had taken refuge under a small area rug. Now, I remember being perfectly horrified by centipedes when I was a kid and of screaming at the sight of one (a much bigger one) just so, but now I am Mom, and Mom hasn’t the luxury of fear or the option of passing the buck. So I put on shoes and lifted the rug and stomped the thing. Then I flushed it down the toilet (known always to my children as Bughalla). I am not usually so helpful, say with spiders in the daytime. “You’re brave. Take care of it,” I’ll say. After all, I am trying to raise an independent woman. The apparently obligatory screams of terror are generally followed by a murderous “Hi-yah!” But last night I was half asleep, and the centipede, due to its speed and its unreasonable abundance of legs, seemed a special case.

“What is it?” my daughter yelped, as the centipede zipped out from under the rug to meet my falling shoe. I heard myself say, “It’s one of those things that moves into your clothes when you leave them on the floor” (amazing the resourcefulness of the maternal brain even when half-asleep). Then I added, “It’s a centipede.” Today no doubt I will say, “I think you’d better vacuum your room in case it laid eggs.”