For the past few months, my wife and I haven’t had much time to ourselves. Right now, at the end of a day’s parenting, there’s often so little time left over that watching 35 minutes of a buzzy TV show – traditionally our favourite pastime – seems a bit pointless. Especially since several times this year, we’ve managed to time it right as a show gets cancelled.
Bedtime is the real time-suck. Since our kids now share a room, our project for the last few months has been putting them down at the same time, to consolidate these parallel chores into one. But this process is fraught. At six, our son insists that he should get to stay up later than a two-year-old. The problem is, I agree with him. It’s likely I’ve been radicalised by my own childhood, but I can’t help balking at the unfairness of our regime. Growing up with 10 siblings, staggered bedtimes were holy writ; stratified to a granular degree, and ruthlessly enforced as a tiny sliver of token separation.
Bedtimes came for us in rigid deadlines, informally attached to the Australian soap operas that knelled each band of time to a close. The youngest were to report themselves abed once Neighbours finished at 6pm. Over-12s, it was agreed, could watch the marginally more self-serious Home and Away, and retire once it ended at 7. But the true Rubicon for emotional maturity was being allowed to watch Heartbreak High, which owed its watershed status to the fact that some of its characters had nose rings and disliked school.
To stay up past that point, you basically had to be old enough to join the army, and such elders within our family governed those below like marines. I was the ninth of 11, so I still associate the credits of these soaps with the near audible swivel of heads from my eight older siblings, as they scanned the room like Terminators for those evading curfew. It’s ironic that having chafed against this system as a child, I now consider it sacrosanct. Irony, David Foster Wallace once wrote, is merely the song of a bird that has come to love its cage. I am just such a bird and looking at my son, with his joke books and obsession with Minecraft lore, I can’t help thinking he needs a bedtime separate from a toddler, not least one who takes 45 minutes to get near sleep in a fully darkened room.
So, we make compromises. We put them down together in their respective bunks at 7.15pm. Story time is directed at my daughter, while my son is given two books to pluck from. Once the main light is turned off, he is granted permission to use his blocky Minecraft torch in his lofty hideaway, a practice he has come to love for the rebellious whiff of samizdat it adds to proceedings.
As slowly as we can, we peel ourselves away from the room, once it is smothered in a chorus of light snoring (hers) and light reading (his). Trembling, we tiptoe downstairs to live our adult lives, to become reacquainted with ourselves once more and, joy of joys, to watch a full hour of some show that has inevitably been cancelled by the time you’re reading this.
