Cock Porn at 2am

‘Where are you going,’ my husband asked groggily.

‘She’s calling out she’s done a poo, I’d better go and see’ I replied.

It was 2.15am. As in the middle of the effing night.

I trudge downstairs and open her door a crack. No tell tale waft of death, but I can hear her sniffing. She’s crying, I think. Oh no, what if she has diarrhoea? I mentally begin rearranging the following day, trying to determine how much work I can get done if I have a sick three year old at my side.

‘Why are you sad honey,’ I ask her, walking toward the bed.

‘Because I want cockcorn. I hungry,’ she said in her tiny adorable voice that suddenly wasn’t so adorable anymore.

What? Did I somehow mistake ‘popcorn’ for ‘poo’? I suppose when you’re ASLEEP it is easy to mistake all sorts of things.

I stare at her shadowy shape in the dark and resist the urge to throw a doll at her head. Instead, in my calmest voice I simply say ‘No. Go back to sleep’, turn, and leave the room.

Only after I close the door do I say a very rude word…

…which is drowned out anyway by an almighty shriek and indignant howls of misery that erupt from within the room.

I pause momentarily and assess my level of anger. Pretty high, I think, based on the fact that someone – either my husband or one of the kids – has woken me pretty much every single night for the past eight years.

There was no way I was going to deal with this in a calm, responsible manner, so I kept walking. I needed to pee anyway, so I just left the volcanic mess behind, which was now throwing itself against the door demanding ‘cockporn’.

Besides, I could hear my husband heading down the stairs. Let him deal with her, I thought, although it was entirely possible his way of solving the problem would be to actually give her a bag of popcorn at 2 o’clock in the morning.

By the time I had finished in the loo the house was dark and silent. Unbelievable. I made my way back upstairs and as soon as my shadow loomed in the door, I heard a chirpy little voice say ‘hello Mummy’, followed by some enthusiastic bouncing on my pillow.

F*ck, I thought. I would have rather he gave her the popcorn.

‘She won’t sleep,’ I muttered climbing in to bed and hauling the blankets off the other two.

It was irrelevant anyway. Whether she slept or not was not the point: the point was that I would not be able to sleep. And just like the 3,000 or so nights that preceded this one, I would not get a full night’s uninterrupted sleep.

If I’m being honest – and I usually am – I am a total bitch between the hours of midnight and 5am. 

The rest of the time I quite a nice person, but unless you catch me at the tail end of a rather awesome party (rather unlikely these days when parties finish at 5pm so we’re all in bed by 8pm) if you find me awake during these hours – I WON’T BE VERY NICE TO YOU. Even if you sprang from my loins (or are trying to spring for them) I don’t want to know you.

Now that my Third Child is three and my eldest is eight, I figure I have been having crap sleep through pregnancy, breast feeding and kids not-sleeping-through for long enough, and it is time for me to reassert my physical right to six hours uninterrupted sleep.

Note how I didn’t ask for eight or ten. Just six. Uninterrupted.

Before I had kids I was an awesome sleeper. I would have won an Olympic gold. My parents installed a smoke alarm in my bedroom when I was at uni because I used to burn incense in there and they quite rightly were concerned I would burn the house down. 

One night a spider walked across the alarm and set it off. Those bastards are loud but I slept straight through it (much to my parent’s disgust) because I was a teenager and I used to be an Olympic gold winning sleeper.

These days, one of the kids can fart in their sleep downstairs and it will wake me up, because I am a Mum, and Mums develop a rather useful (but annoying) desire to ensure their kids are safe.

Enough is enough.

No more farting. No more cockporn in the middle of the night. I need to reclaim my sleep.

So if anyone has any good advice, please let me know: how can I reclaim my sleep?

My Mum Crush

I was sitting with two friends from my mothers group when I made an embarrassing admission.

I told them I had a Mum Crush.

Now, there are two ways conversations like this generally go. One is that people who have known you for years stare at you strangely, there is an uncomfortable silence and then suddenly everyone remembers they left a load of washing on and they all leave, never to speak to you again.

Luckily, this particular conversation went the other way.

‘Oh, me too,’ said one of them.

‘Hmmm, Simone*,’ sighed the other one

‘Yes!’ the other one said nodding.

I was a bit jealous they shared the same Mum Crush, but their kids went to a different school than mine.

‘Who’s your Mum Crush?’ my friend asked. ‘Why is she so good?’

I shrugged. I was hardly going to tell them that when I see her I think of the ‘Everything is Awesome’ song from the Lego Movie, cos she is just – awesome.

You have to remember Mum Crush’s aren’t about sex (what’s that anyway?) or anything physical, so it wasn’t that she was particularly attractive – although she is. To me, at least.

And it wasn’t that her life was something I coveted, or that her kids were better than mine, or husband was more manly. None of these things feature in a Mum Crush.

‘Well, I just find her fascinating. She talks about interesting things and we have actual conversations,’ I said. ‘Remember those?’ I said sourly as our three year olds raced through the room with handfuls of Tiny Teddies.

I said a LOT more than this (but have to maintain some level of dignity here, unlike at Mothers Group where no one expects me to have any dignity) until I realised I was gabbling like a school girl, gushing over the fact that *gasp* someone liked to talk to me.

But my friends were nodding. They totally got it.

A Mum Crush is different to a friend, probably because they’re just slightly outside your sphere. Perhaps your kids are in different classes or they go to a different school. But you probably share something – a relic of a life before you had kids perhaps – and she reminds you what it is like to be not a mum. And you love her for it.

Do you have a Mum Crush?

*Names have been changed to protect my friends. Actually, since I can’t actually remember the name of their Mum Crush, it’s entirely possible that is her real name. Sorry about that.