When my daughter, Clementine, was a baby she went through a period where, instead of sleeping, she screamed her head off.
Every single night.
If we hadn’t all been so miserable it probably would have been funny: like clockwork she would wake up around midnight and then cry inconsolably until three. All of the baby books I read suggested that she was just getting her days and nights confused, and that we should simply “nudge” her back into a normal sleeping pattern. I don’t remember exactly how we were supposed to do the nudging, but I do remember that Baby NyQuil was frowned upon. Or, at least it was frowned upon as far as giving it to the baby went—adult consumption was probably expected. (Although the adult version of Baby NyQuil is usually called “Scotch.”)
Luckily for us, and despite the lack of any decent advice, whatever we did (or didn’t do) eventually worked, and by the time she was a year old her sleeping patterns became normal again, and have, with a few exceptions, stayed that way ever since.
My son Clyde, on the other hand, never had a problem with sleeping through the night. There were no late light scream sessions, no “confusion” between day and night; unlike Clementine (with whom I had the TV schedule memorized), with Clyde I nearly forgot what late night television looked like.
Imagine my surprise, then, when this summer, thirteen years after his birth, Clyde finally went through his “completely normal” baby phase of confusing his days and nights. And while he doesn’t cry inconsolably like his sister did seventeen years ago, that doesn’t mean there isn’t screaming involved. It’s just that, this time, the screaming isn’t being directed at me.
Of course, that doesn’t make it any easier to wake up to. Especially when the screaming is soon followed by shouts of “Kill the settlers! Kill the settlers!”
That’s right: Clyde is a gamer. Which means that, for him, days and nights are not just confused, they have ceased to exist, because in the dark, manky reaches of a teenage boy’s lair, lit only by the glow of a computer screen, what difference does it make if it’s day or night outside? Of course, it doesn’t help that some of the people he games with live halfway around the world, so that what is night time for Clyde is the middle of the day for them. (Although, on a scale of one to hobo, I’m not sure which is worse—gaming your nights or your days away.)
I realize that this habit of his—obsessively gaming into the wee hours of the night (or perhaps the wee wee hours, since it is usually when I get up to pee that I notice he’s still up)—is something I’m supposed to wring my hands and worry over, but I just can’t find it in me to be too bothered that he’s rather forego sleep for an adventure. Maybe it’s because I played Dungeons and Dragons all through high school (yeah, I was not only a nerd, I was that kind of a nerd), or maybe it’s because I enjoy eavesdropping on Clyde’s one-sided conversations (the headphones mean I can only hear his responses, and believe me, “Kill the settlers” is one of the tamer things I have heard), but as far as I’m concerned I have to agree with Clyde that between sleep and gaming, gaming seems to be a whole lot more fun.
And besides, aren’t you supposed to sleep when you’re dead? Or at school? Something like that. And anyway, it could be a whole lot worse: he could be a settler. Talk about having to sleep with one eye open.