This is Isaac. 

And this is Isaac by about 3:30 PM on a day where he has not napped.

He’s three years old. He’s losing the nap. This is a natural, expected phenomenon; a routine developmental step. It’s just that I wish he didn’t have to be so astonishingly grumpy about the process. He comes home from the babysitter’s and immediately finds his blanket and drapes himself over the sofa or his bed or across the kitchen floor on a little blanket nest, removing his thumb from his mouth only to tell you that everything you do is wrong. Like singing. Or breathing. Or taking his picture.

As the late afternoon wears on, he winds himself up into a hyper fit of exhaustion that generally stops when he slams himself into a wall and crumples into a sodden mass of desperate tears and we carry him upstairs, howling “I NOT going to sleep! I NOT going to SLEEP!”

“Of course you’re not, buddy,” we tell him, lying him down and slipping pajamas onto him. “Of course you’re not.”

Way back in the early days of the Internet, circa 1998 or so, Rachel and I, egged on by some friends (hi, M & H!), took an online personality survey, one of those Kinsey-type things, with approximately 100 questions that asked things like whether we picked the phone up on the first ring or let it go always to machine (machine! See how old the survey was — not voicemail, but machine!). Based on your answers, it then classified you into one of four personality types, and from there, into one of four further subtypes.

I would stake Isaac in a bet that Rachel and I answered every single question differently. You just have to trust me on this. We operate differently. And yet, AND YET … this computer program gave us not only the same personality type but also the same subtype. Meaning that, out of 16 possible configurations, we got the same one. (If math is your thing, tell me if I’ve got the odds of that correct.) Further, it wasn’t as though the whole world was equally divided among four personality types, further subdivided: the site explained that some types were much rarer than others. And that our type was very rare.

Our type?

Master controller.

This is essentially a metaphor for our relationship as a whole. We are both in charge, all the time, albeit in radically different ways. Fifteen years in, maybe we’ve mellowed. Maybe now we’re just apprentice controllers. In any case, we have mostly managed to make this work for us. Sometimes the aggression is too passive, sometimes we go for stretches where the passion loses some of its passion and then we aggressively work on finding the passion again. Occasionally the aggression is downright aggressive — or sometimes quite passionate, depending on your viewpoint — but, well … mostly it’s a tightly run ship around here. (Those of you who have witnessed the household firsthand will refrain from the comments section.)

(Oh, and although it’s too soon to say, I would stake Rowan in a bet that we are well on our way to raising another generation of master controllers. Just a hunch.)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which Rachel and I are similar, and how we’re different. My sense is that we operate in a very small spectrum of similarity — and that within that spectrum, the differences are vast. In other words, we are a lot alike, but so close that the differences are noticeable. Or something like that. For the record, however, here are some of the ways in which we are fraternal:

1. Her: Gratification. Me: Deferral of. Rachel is really, really good at relaxing, whereas I am really, really good at doing the seven or eight things that need to get done before I can relax. Which usually means that I never end up relaxing, because by the time I get around to it, it’s time to go to bed. Rachel does not fold laundry while watching television. Rachel eats chocolate at the outset of an unpleasant task, and I fold T-shirts to Glee, while bouncing on my exercise ball.

2. Her: Scrabble. Me: Boggle. She claims that Boggle is too loud, and I claim that Scrabble is too long. In truth, they are our childhood games and we are loyal to them. And we can cream each other at our own games.

3. Rachel loses things and I find them. I was going to write, “I am the finder and Rachel is the…” but that seemed mean. But I can’t tell you how many conversations in our house goes something like:  Rachel: “Where are my—?” Susan: “Kitchen counter, next to the teapot.”

4. Her: Could sleep on a pile of rocks. Me: Earplugs, eye mask, 600 thread-count sheets, cats locked in the basement, the right pillows, utter and complete darkness and silence. This difference explains, in part, the next one:

5. Her: Camping. Me: Would rather be shot in the head.

6. Although we’re both omnivores, Rachel has been quicker to embrace the culinary traditions of my people — Eastern European Jews — than I have to embrace those of hers: the Brits. Although she maintains that she does not like a good brisket, she is completely on board for gefilte fish, matzoh ball soup, lox and cream cheese (although we both concede that the Scots do a fine job with smoked salmon, too), rugelach, hamantaschen, etc. I., however, am not so good with custard, boiled suet puddings in bags with lots of raisins, fried Mars bars and the like. I like Yorkshire pudding and a good roast beef, but I’m not orgasmic about them. (Unless the roast beef is really, really rare.) We are both, however, equally passionate about Indian food, which is, really, what the British seem to do best. And we are both horrified by kishke.

7. We have different shoe sizes. This is likely a good thing, because if we wore the same size shoes, I could see us violating our vow not to share clothes (because that is just SUCH a slippery slope) and going all Carrie-Bradshaw-meets-John-Fluevog. And then we probably wouldn’t be able to feed the children.

8. Rachel pretends not to enjoy musical theater but secretly adores it, while I pretend not to like our grey tabby cat, but secretly don’t like our grey tabby cat. It’s just that she (the cat, not Rachel, who has personality in spades — she is, after all, the Queen of Irony) has no personality. Seriously, the cat is a cipher. There is no there there. She’s nearly transparent, except when she stands, oozing of blandness, in front of my computer monitor and obstructs my view of my work. She had serious potential as a kitten, and then completely fizzled out. It’s sad. It really is.

9. Rachel has fine, straight hair and  I. Do. Not. And I am jealous. Rachel has the hair I have spent my entire life coveting. Instead, I make do with lots of products, the master scissors of one Jimi Imij, hairstylist to the gods at Coupe Bizarre on Queen West in Toronto (and yes, I still travel to get my hair cut, because Jimi thins it out like nobody’s business; it looks like somebody had a litter of kittens on the floor by the time he’s done), and a straightening iron. This difference may also contribute to difference #5 above: it’s hard to enjoy camping when your hair immediately turns to crap.

10. When I cook, I follow the recipe. When Rachel cooks, she deviates. It’s a point of pride — she has to substitute one spice for another, double the cream, mess with the ratio of flour to sugar, etc. She can’t not do that. Rachel also likes to hover when I cook, asking questions like, “Did you put in the cumin?” “Yes,” I will say, “I put in the quarter teaspoon of cumin that the recipe called for.” “Oh,” she’ll say, “and what are you doing with those onions?” “I am going to fry them,” I will say, “just like it says to in the recipe.” “Oh,” she’ll say, “and—” and I will say, “The recipe is right there, and I think you should read it.” She maintains that she is simply making conversation, but I know she’s secretly itching to modify my recipe. (That sounds so suggestive, “Baby, can I modify your recipe?”) I’m all for improvisation, but I tend to reserve my improvisational skills for making up silly songs to sing to the kids. I do, however, double the vegetables in any recipe, because my mother told me to. And she was right.

Still, we eat well.

Back in the days when IKEA charged a flat fee of $35 to deliver any amount of furniture anywhere in Canada, Rachel ordered an entire one-bedroom’s apartment worth of BILLY bookcases and EKTORP desks and other loveseats-with-names to furnish her apartment in Thunder Bay. Among those items was a double box spring and mattress set — I forget its name, so let’s just call it LARS — that she used for the year until I and the rest of our furniture moved up from the Big Smoke to join her. We put LARS in what would eventually be Rowan’s room and graduated to a queen-size Sealy Posturepedic of our own.

The thing is — as I remembered this morning, all snuggled up in what has become my five-year-old’s bed — LARS is the most comfortable bed in the house. Our Posturepedic is fine and all, but it does not have the Scandinavian je ne sais quoi, the perfect sleepability of LARS. LARS, like the baby bear’s bed, is just right. Plus, when a child arrives at one in the morning for a cuddle and subsequently settles in for the night, I really wish we had sprung for the king-size mattress. Things get a little crowded. Which is why, last night, I left Rachel and Rowan in the Sealy and decamped for LARS, quite happy to be ensconced underneath a sailboat comforter in a comfy bed all to myself.

At least, until 5:30 AM, when Isaac woke up to hurl abuse at me and needed resettling and Rachel stumbled into Rowan’s room to say she had been awake since three.

“Do you want to climb in here?” I asked, on my way out of bed to shush Isaac.

“No,” she said. “Well, yes.” And she snuggled up in LARS while I got to go listen to the two-year-old complaint department gripe that I wasn’t Rachel and where was Rachel and he wanted Rachel not me so I should just go in the garbage. Which I took as my cue to return to Rachel and LARS, for another 45 minutes. “This is the garbage,” I told her, and we both fell back to sleep.

Things could be worse, though. These days, Isaac is more or less sleeping through the night again, after an incredibly tedious few months of waking twice or three times and calling out for us. We finally dealt with that problem, however, with the highly controversial technique of RIDING IT OUT AND WAITING TO SEE IF THINGS WOULD CHANGE ALL BY THEMSELVES. Which they did. I’m going to write a best-selling book about how you can do that with your two-year-old, too.

Funny, though, how much things have changed when it comes to sleep. In my parenting incarnation of a few years, or even months, back, I would have been planning, strategizing, spending the precious little energy I have left coming up with a plan, A PLAN, to get the baby to sleep. I would have been trading off nights with Rachel in the basement in order to ensure that we were both at least half-rested.

At this point, though, we seem to be wise enough — and well-rested enough, and, let’s not forget, healthy enough — that we can take the stretches of interrupted nights more or less in stride. I chalk it up partly to increased levels of Zen, but also fatality: what, really, could we have done to prevent the child from waking up? And what else was there to do but help get him back to sleep? And then go back to sleep ourselves, wherever and however we could? I like it, this new Zen. It’s so much better than hysteria. Really, it’s just — and don’t kill me for this one — common sense.

So, it’s been a week. Or two. I would offer an excuse— but look! Boys in matching dinosaur pajamas!

I’m guessing that distraction doesn’t work so well for those of you over the age of eight or so, but wouldn’t it be nice if it did? Like if, instead of trying to explain to a client why that press release won’t be coming today or to your significant other why you haven’t yet — even though you said you would last week — made an appointment to have the snow tires put on the car, you could just say, “Hey, look! A raisin! Do you want one? No? How about two — one for each hand? Yummy raisins!”

Yummy raisins. Whatever.

In my defense, my doctor told me last Saturday that my gunky sinuses and fluid-filled ears were the worst specimens she’d seen in the past six months, which made me feel sort of proud, in a warped kind of way. I like to overachieve, and the past few weeks have not felt so stellar in that regard. Not being able to hear or breathe or sleep properly will do that to a girl, I suppose.

Honestly, possibly my biggest triumph in the last few weeks has been ridding the fridge of several near-empty Tupperware containers, thus contributing to the overall organization of the house. I’d eat that final half-square of polenta or Isaac’s container of rejected cottage cheese and I would feel a disproportionate sense of accomplishment.

Hey — did you notice that the dinosaur pajamas glow in the dark?

I thought about blogging. Really, I did. I had lots of half-formed ideas, imagined how I might have turned a dozen just darling things the kids did into full-fledged posts, and then I went to bed. In, of course, the basement, every second night, so that Rachel wouldn’t keep me awake with the hacking sounds of her, oh, pneumonia. (Which, unlike my ear/sinus infection, did not respond so well to the first round of antibiotics and inhaled corticosteroids. Now I’m mostly better and she’s, well, not. Thank God for socialized medicine; you guys in the States should try it sometime.)

Thank God, also, that my mother-in-law arrived yesterday. With matching dino PJs in tow. She spent much of today bustling about and tidying things and making cups of tea and comfort foods (including custard and chicken soup; yes, really) for her daughter and then accompanying me to various children’s end-of-year activities. Like Rowan’s class play — an inspired, French-language rendition of Chicken Little. (‹Oh, non! Le çiel tomb!› But you have to clutch your face like you’re in Edvard Munsch’s The Scream while you say it VERY SERIOUSLY.)

And now Rachel’s mom is asleep in the basement, and the boys are asleep in their beds, and Rachel is asleep in our bed, and I’m going to turn in on the couch. So as not to be awakened by the coughing.

I’ll be back — I promise. The sky isn’t quite falling; it’s just that it’s taking a little bit more work than usual to hold it up.

These things are so much harder to put together than to take apart, aren’t they? Or maybe I’ve got that the wrong way around.

Field study notes: The sleeping habits of the suburban queer family

Location: Detached, two-story family home in northwestern Ontario.

Subjects: Occupants of house: Two adult women (codenames: Buttercup and Sausage), parents of one four-year-old boy (codename: Quiggy Quoggy Quoo), one toddler (codename: Pwink).

NOTES

March 2009: Buttercup and Sausage have alternated sleeping on the futon in the basement in order to slow their child-induced, sleep-deprived descent into hell.

April 2009: In an effort to make bed- and night-times smoother, Buttercup and Sausage set up a single bed in Quiggy Quoggy Quoo’s room (hereinafter referred to, with varying degrees of success, as “The Brother Room”) for the thrilled Pwink, who has been longing to share in the bedtime festivities. After some initial bumps, the new system takes hold and all four family members resume sleeping through the night, on one level.

Buttercup, in a flurry of optimism and determination, hauls the double futon up from the basement to Pwink’s former room and declares it “The Spare Room.”

Nothing lasts.

Some highlights:

Wednesday, April 22, 7:30 p.m.: Pwink yells, “Love you!” over and over as Buttercup descends the stairs at bedtime. QQQ complains that Pwink is too loud and decides to sleep in Buttercup and Sausage’s bed. They will transfer him back to his own bed later on in the evening.

4:10 a.m.: Pwink wakes up and announces, “Mama, cuddle!” As a result, QQQ also wakes up and requests cuddles. Sausage climbs in with QQQ and Buttercup hauls the duvet off the parental bed and bunks down with Pwink. She must have slept, because she knows she dreamed (of weddings), but it doesn’t really feel like it. Sausage, whose bed is now duvet-less, sneaks out of QQQ’s bed and goes to sleep in the spare room.

Thursday, April 23, 12:40 p.m.: Pwink goes down for his afternoon nap. Spurns his single bed in the “brother room” in favour of QQQ’s bed. Two minutes in, decides that the futon in the spare room would be best and traipses across the hall to sleep there, exhorting Buttercup to join him. They settle down, he sticks thumb in mouth, and 10 minutes later he is asleep. Buttercup leaves. Later, she may regret not napping with him. But regrets are for the weak. She is not weak. No.

Thursday evening, 8:22 p.m.: Buttercup finds herself lying next to Pwink for 45 minutes until he is completely and utterly asleep. Each time she tries to leave, he wakes up and says, “Mama, night night!”, patting the bed beside him. If she continues to tiptoe out of the room, he starts to cry, forcing her back in so as not to wake up QQQ. Pwink has Buttercup’s number.

Friday morning, 3:30 a.m.: Buttercup wakes because her right arm is COMPLETELY ASLEEP and numb to the touch. This happens more and more frequently of late, and while it has nothing directly to do with the children, it never happened before they arrived and so must somehow be their fault. She turns over and uses her left arm to haul her right arm into a less compromising position and wonders, as she always does, whether the recurrent pins and needles are doing permanent damage, and what would happen if she didn’t wake up: amputation? She goes back to sleep.

5:22 a.m.: Pwink wakes up. Calls out, and in so doing wakes up QQQ. Sausage attempts damage control by bringing Pwink to sleep with Buttercup, except that QQQ follows them both into the parental bed and cannot be persuaded to cuddle up in his own bed with Sausage. All four lie down. Much squirming ensues.

5:32 a.m.: Just as everyone relaxes enough to make Buttercup think that just maybe, sleep might just occur, someone snores. Pwink sits bolt upright and announces, “Noise!” QQQ grumbles about Pwink being awake. Sausage absconds with Pwink to QQQ’s bed to stave off the possibility of all four having to get up. Pwink cries.

5:35 a.m.: Buttercup tells QQQ she will be “right back — don’t move!” and delivers lost blankie to Pwink and Sausage. Pwink continues to cry

5:42 a.m.: Buttercup tells QQQ she will be “right back — don’t move!” But she is lying. She instead climbs into QQQ’s bed with Pwink and Sausage, who immediately stops crying and snuggles. Sausage leaves that ungrateful Pwink and climbs into bed with QQQ. Buttercup, her arm trapped beneath Pwink’s head, stares at the open door and tries to will it closed with her eyes. It doesn’t work.

5:46 a.m.: Pwink asks for water.

6:10 a.m.: QQQ decides it’s time to get up. Buttercup is fairly certain — based on previous experience — that Sausage has coached him on keeping his mouth closed (“Like this!” and mimes buttoning her lips together) and being extra quiet as they descend the stairs. By virtue of the open door and his hawklike hearing, Pwink hears them anyway. Insists on getting up. Insists that Buttercup come with him down the stairs. Buttercup delivers Pwink to Sausage in the kitchen and returns to sleep in her own bed, because it is officially her morning to “sleep in.”

Friday evening, 7:23 p.m.: Sausage finds herself lying next to Pwink until he is completely and utterly asleep. Each time she tries to leave, he wakes up and says, “Mama, night night!”, patting the bed beside him. If she continues to tiptoe out of the room, he starts to cry, forcing her back in so as not to wake up QQQ. Pwink has Sausage’s number. Sausage fall asleep next to Pwink and stumbles downstairs two hours later.

Saturday morning, 2:11 a.m.: QQQ appears in the parental bedroom because he is cold, and insists there is room for all three of them in Sausage and Buttercup’s bed. He climbs in. Buttercup decamps for the spare room.

6:12 a.m.: Pwink wakes up, ready for the day. Buttercup gets up too.

1:04 p.m.: Pwink goes down for a nap. Buttercup who is tired and oddly besotted, take him upstairs and lays him down in QQQ’s bed. When he says, “Mama, cuddle,” she lies down. One day, they will have to break him out this habit, but right now the thing she wants to do most is snuggle up with her baby boy. She’s a sucker. He has her number.

Tuesday night: For a variety of reasons too tedious to detail here, Buttercup spends the night on the futon with Pwink’s feet tap dancing in the small of her back. She does Not Sleep Well.

Wednesday morning, 2:13 a.m.: Pwink appears in the parental bed.

Wednesday morning, 5:15 a.m.: Pwink wakes up, hysterical. Sausage suggests to Buttercup that she should just suck it up and get up with him. Buttercup counters that Pwink will indeed go back to sleep in a few minutes. Sausage decamps for the futon, but is waylaid by QQQ, who has woken up because of all the screaming. Sausage bunks down with QQQ.

Wednesday morning, 5:23 a.m.: Buttercup sucks it up.

—

And so it goes. I haven’t bed hopped this much since … aaaaaaaaand, you know? I’m not gonna finish that sentence.