It turns out it wasn't just the baby-sitter.
No, it was something new and peculiar happening inside LittleBear's head. Because it's now happened three times in the past week, with my beloved little boy not waking up, but still sitting bolt upright in bed, sobbing and whimpering, trembling convulsively and muttering incoherently. Last night it was "Mummy.... Mummy.... Mummy...." as I held him close and smoothed his hair. I simply held him until the episode passed and his body relaxed back into sleep, at which point, unlike the previous two incidents, we were then able to tuck him back under his own covers and leave him to sleep peacefully for the rest of the night. And he has absolutely no memory of it today.
I'd been out with a couple of friends last night, and LittleBear had known this. Did a fear of my absence trigger the distress, as it seemed to on The Night of The Babysitter? Did being exhausted from a full day at holiday camp cause his sleep to be somehow askew?
According to the NHS, night terrors are not anything to do with deep psychological trauma, but can be exhaustion, illness, anxiety, or even a full bladder, and I'm finding it very hard to believe them. The NHS also say you should not hold or comfort your child during a night terror, but simply allow it to pass while making sure your child is safe. And I definitely don't believe them, because my son needs the security of my arms around him, and my voice in his ear, and my kisses on his sweaty, scared little head. With every fibre of my being I know that to be the case. The way he clambers into my arms, even in his sleep, tells me so. The way he burrows his head into my chest tells me so. The way he clings to me tells me so. So, one has to wonder why I even bothered to consult the NHS, since I have decided to either partially or completely reject what I've read.
So here I sit, tired and somewhat fretful. Again. In fact, I think "tired and somewhat fretful" is probably the best description I can come up with for my state since bringing another human being into the world. It's probably what I should have called this blog from the beginning.
And, because I'm tired, the world is once again becoming a dark and horrible place. And because I'm somewhat fretful, most of those concerns revolve around my LittleBear and his wellbeing. Except the ones that revolve around my own fragile sense of self-worth. Sometimes I manage to let the two intersect. For example, currently I am veering firmly into being convinced that my LittleBear is in some way irrevocably damaged, and that it is all rooted in my evil abandonment of him for an evening last week. Two birds with one stone there - he is emotionally scarred and I am a bad mother.
Naturally, when I allow the rational, normal part of my brain a say in things, I start to think that perhaps the fine folk of the NHS might know something. But I think we've already, all too frequently, established that when I am over-tired I do not allow the rational, normal part of my brain very much airtime. So today I am tired, and therefore I am useless and a failure, and my precious baby is damaged and afraid. It doesn't even matter that almost every parent I've spoken to has an anecdote about their own child's night terrors. Night terrors appear to be one of those things that happen to a great many children, and yet almost nobody ever mentions them. It remains something of a mystery to me why there are so many of these parenting secrets. Was there a set of classes I missed in which we were told all these things? Is everyone else more assiduous about reading books on childhood development? Is this just another way in which I've failed? By being ignorant of the things that might befall my boy, I condemn him to my own incompetent mothering.
I said to a friend the other day, "I don't know why LittleBear worries about everything so much..."
My friend looked at me with one eyebrow raised and laughed.
He has a point.
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