Last night was not a vintage night in my household. We were very much awake for most of it, so much so that I just had a mid morning nap, brief and blissfull, on the playstation console. My son is also feeling the burn, pressing his forehead and eyes into any available solid object like coasters and baby wipe packets, while hankering after any unavailable solid object (I saw the way he looked at my slipper). But it is his damn fault that we are tired, with his constant flailing and griping – when will he learn?!! By 8 months, they should have this down, shouldn’t they? But no – if my son were a Viking, he would go by the name of ‘Theodore, the Sleepfighter’. So, yes, we are really tired.
Fact 1 – no one is surprised when, as a new parent, you say you are tired. Fact 2 – gatherings of new parents will try and out tired each other with anecdotes of extreme acts committed while tired (you were so tired that you put your car keys in the fridge? I was so tired that I voted for UKIP!) Fact 3 – it is an entirely boring conversation to have, up there with routes taken to destinations and one’s health.
I am going to own the tiredness.
So my son is a little peaky today – teething undoubtedly, grouchy, pissed off. He’s okay though, in fact he is now asleep in his chair, beaten but unbowed. Instead of trying to sleep (what a loser would do) or cry about being tired (same), I will use my delirium to think about all the ways T would have been treated through history for his current, slightly ‘off’ condition. Bearing in mind that I have no sense of history, or geography, which is akin to having no sense of time or space, which is akin to being accurate, this should be a short and highly speculative (i.e historically false) list. Here we go:
Viking era – T would have been offered to the Gods. His moods would be used to discern the weather. I think he would be a talisman.
Middle Ages – T would have been diagnosed by a monk with having too much bile and would have been covered in leeches. If this didn’t work, he may have been declared a devil child.
Victorian Era – he would have been diagnosed with something, anything, in front of a paying audience.
Early 1900s – He would have been diagnosed as hysteric and sent for dream analysis and then a cure in Switzerland.
1920s – given rum
1950s – given some of those new fangled wonder drugs that everyone is talking about
1970s – bathed in breastmilk and forced into tree pose while someone cleansed his aura with a mung bean
1980s – sterilised and placed in a hyperbaric chamber
2010s – analysed via online forum by various warring factions who weigh in on the best possible way to treat him based on what they had read online. This in itself would then become an online story on a clickbait website.
As it is, I will watch him for a bit and then give thanks for the fact that he is asleep and then quietly retreat to somewhere comfortable … like a playstation, for example.
Night night.
Stefanie Moore 