Alarm clocks

I’d just signed Artie out at pickup when his after school teacher, a young woman named Miss Bai, came up to me.

“Arthur is so cute,” she said. I relaxed a little bit. These short exchanges during pickup are often when she provides feedback – most of which is positive: “Arthur played very well today, not too rough.” Or, “Arthur spent most of his free play time coloring in. He likes cars, especially fast, expensive ones, so you could also print some coloring sheets out at home for him.” But sometimes she’ll tell me that he did, albeit unintentionally, play too rough with some unfortunate classmate or that he had a harder time than usual keeping his fingers out of his mouth.

Her voice is soft and sweet, and the way she talks to me, with gentle reassurance, is also the way she speaks to the kids. Had she been my teacher, I would have wished to sit as close to her as possible.

Today she said that they had been discussing alarm clocks in class.

“Every single kid. Every single one, except for Arthur, said that their mothers use the alarms on their phones. Arthur said, ‘My little brother is my mother’s alarm clock. He cries and wakes her up every morning.'”

I chuckled and said that Arthur was right. What he didn’t tell her was that he is now in charge of getting Chompy out of bed, saving Tom or I -depending on whose morning it is to get up first- a short but difficult trip down the hall. This is how it’s been for the last four or five weeks. One morning Artie came in to our room, as he usually does, except that day he was followed shortly by Chompy, who bounded in with a wide grin and startled us with his presence.

“How…?” Tom and I looked at each other. As far as we knew, Chompy had not yet mastered climbing out of the crib yet.

“I heard him crying so I pulled him out!” Artie beamed.

To celebrate this milestone, Tom and I stayed in bed for an extra fifteen minutes while the kids climbed on our heads.

It’s always a small revelation, when you realize that a difficult part of the day (morning) has been made slightly easier because the kids have grown up just a little bit more and become a bit more independent. At the same time, these developments are accompanied by little pangs of sadness precisely because they’ve grown.

We have a digital frame that continuously reminds us of how they were at all ages (and how young we once were). This morning, a photo of Artie, aged three, popped up. He was climbing on the couch, as he is in many photos, his face still toddler round. I said to Tom that I couldn’t believe I yelled at that little round face as much as I did, even though I was pregnant and tired and irritated all the time. Though this is no excuse. Part of the problem was, I saw Artie as older than he was. I still see him that way sometimes.

“You still yell at a lot,” Tom said.

I pursed my lips. No need to aggravate the guilt.

But there it is anyway. A hundred little alarms each day, mostly my kids telling me that for now, they still want my attention. They want me to wake up. To cut strawberries. To pack snacks. To pick them up. To play. Artie wants me to check out the fort he’s built, where in-between couch cushions he’s wedged formerly pristine rolls of toilet paper to serve as “peep holes”. And Chompy wants me to assuage his pain because because he’s faced yet another injustice in that he’s either been left out of or trapped in said fort.

It all feels very nonstop, but that’s the alarm clock for you. Being woken up during the groundhog days of toddlerhood until we’re waking them up for the groundhog days of their teenage years and on and on until we’re empty nesters and wondering where the hell the time went.

Up until a few weeks ago, when we still lived with my parents, I (and increasingly Artie, who welcomed the little responsibility) would sometimes wake my mom to take her morning medication. She has five alarms set for her medication times, but more often than not, as she’s not as attached to her phone as the rest of us are, we hear it before she does. My father would hand me the pills and my mother’s thermos of hot water with a slice of ginger, and I’d walk it down the hall to their still darkened room.

Her sleep has always been light – a symptom or a cause of the disease, it’s unclear, but on the occasions she didn’t hear me call her, I’d gently put a hand on her arm, and she’d quickly blink awake.

“Is it time?” she would say, her voice still thick with sleep.

“Yes,” I’d hand her the medication, then the thermos. Sometimes she’d go back to sleep and sometimes, she’d ask me to help her out of bed. In those moments, I couldn’t help but wonder about the day one of my sons might have to wake me for my medication or help me out of bed. It wasn’t a given, and the thought both comforted and saddened me.

“I missed the alarm,” my mother would say, taking the pills, the sip of water. But it was alright because at least for the time being, I was there to wake her.