Control, Hope, and Blankies

It’s not about the blankets.

Even though the blankets are the bane of my evening, every evening, and I hate them with a passion bordering on fury, it’s not about the blankets.

There are five of them: The muslin “car” blankie (we have a muslin blanket in the car, so every muslin blanket is now a car blankie), the cotton flannel “Aunty Laura” blankie (because Aunty Laura’s mom, who doesn’t even know us personally, was kind enough to gift it to us), the “cozy crib” blankie (the duvet I purchased in hopes of it replacing all the other blankets; alas), the fuzzy blankie (self-explanatory), and the thin cotton “doggy” blankie (which has dogs on it).

The blankets are to be put on in this specific order, and only in this specific order, on pain of death by tantrum. They must lay smoothly on the side of the crib, then they must also be put on “smoothly”, whatever that means, and only ever one at a time; I once tried to shortcut the torment by putting them on all together, and boy, did that not go over well. At any moment after they have been carefully placed, the blankets could be kicked off and I could be reprimanded that they are “not the right way”. I am never told what the right way means.

The parenting therapist I hire to help me address the nightmare that is bedtime tells me it’s not about the blankets; it’s about control. Through my tears, I laugh darkly at the absurdity of paying someone $200 an hour to tell me it’s not about the blankets. I know she is right, but I’m still wildly resentful that she won’t tell me I’m right for setting boundaries like only putting the blankets back on one time before obstinately holding the line. Let me tell you: a battle of wills with a three-year-old is one you will never win. Not even if they submit.

I get through the seemingly interminable tantrums that often precede the blankets by zoning out, taking deep, ferocious breaths to keep the hot lava climbing up my torso from erupting out of my mouth. Then come the blankets. But it’s not about the blankets; they are only a symbol of everything that stands in the way of my freedom. The skin-crawling feeling of being trapped threatens to choke me some nights, even though I am technically free to leave the darkened 9x9 room any time I please.

After practicing ceding control for a few weeks, I am finally able to swallow my panic that putting the blankets on yet again will result in a spiral of giving in to whatever she wants (which will itself result in her never going to bed again). The blankets lose their power. But the suffocating sense of confinement doesn’t go away; it just shifts its locus. It’s not the blankets anymore; it’s the stuffies, or the water bottle, or that I won’t show her the picture of her sleeping that I will take later that night when I come to check on her, because I haven’t taken it yet.

Even in my desperation, I can see that bedtime, when my normally relatively delightful three-year-old becomes a screaming ball of unquenchable need, is a microcosm for life. Walking home from the park the other day, after telling a mom friend that I’m going back on antidepressants because three is hard and perimenopause doesn’t help, she asks if it’s been this way since I had my daughter, or if it felt like this before. “Because we often lose that sense of our autonomy, you know. Our lives stop being ours.” Gut. Punched. I hold in my tears and don’t own up to the increasing feeling of captivity. I wanted this, I love her, etc.; none of that has changed. I just don’t remember when I last felt like my life was mine.

There are so many things we swear to ourselves, before we come parents, that we will never do. The naïveté! I told myself I wouldn’t be one of “those parents” who lose themselves (and by parents, I mostly mean moms; dads so rarely seem to lose any part of themselves). I would live my life fully, keep my self, I declared. Maybe, in an alternate timeline in which she hadn’t been born in 2021 into isolation beyond what I could ever have imagined, or I had a partner and could “just dip out to a yoga class”, that might have been possible. Hormones, age, and reality being what they were, I became what I said I never would, without planning it, without even noticing it, really.

My days are a blur of getting up, getting ready, daycare drop-off, work, daycare pickup, dinner, bedtime, TV, or if I can muster the energy, writing. Am I resentful about this? More than a little. I absolutely wouldn’t give up being her mom for anything. I want this small, beautiful, domestic life (perhaps without the nightly hellscape of bedtime). And, I miss my old life. That life, though, disappeared before she arrived; this isolation is a pandemic hangover that won’t go away. The rhythms of life with friends, community, have largely evaporated, subsumed by the rhythms of raising the young. I know it won’t always be this way, but do I really want the first five or so years of her life to be lost years? A period from which I’ll recover, finding myself again? I can’t wait that long. I miss myself.

When the psychiatrist asks me if I feel hopeless, I sigh dramatically. His questions are meant to be answered neatly, yes or no, strongly agree to strongly disagree, for the period of the past two weeks. I try to articulate that I don’t feel hopeless about life overall; I feel hopeless about not spending the majority of my days in a cycle of snapping irritably at my daughter, being overcome by guilt, then sobbing, later, after she’s gone to bed, because I feel so out of control. In her essay “Birth at the End of the World”, Sofia Mostaghimi writes “It makes me wonder how much of a sense of power and control is necessary in our lives to allow for hope”; with no sense of either, I’m left feeling existentially constricted.

Apparently, this is all symptomatic of depression. Which, fine. But that friend who asked about a loss of autonomy? Not depressed. I don’t know many mothers who don’t feel at least some sense of this loss. It is what is expected of us, is it not? Motherhood is sacrifice, right? Mother’s Day, at least as we celebrate it in North America, was conceived of in 1905 as a way to honour these sacrifices: expected, revered, but rarely questioned.

In their introduction to Good Mom on Paper, Stacey May Fowles and Jen Sookfong Lee write: “We know that mothers are connected by a struggle to fit into structures that at best fail to nurture us, and at worst keep us out.” This is true of any mother, at least in Western cultures, but exponentially so for single mothers. In a world that revolves around a very specific definition of family, the very fabric of the way we live is designed to keep us out, keep us alone, unless we work very diligently to overcome it. On the single mom by choice message boards, the question pops up regularly: “I want to do this, but I don’t have much family or many friends around. Is it a bad idea?” Don’t do it, I want to say. Not unless you are made of the strongest and friendliest stock and can build a village from scratch. But who I am to squash their hope, just because mine has dampened?

When I tearfully express my hopelessness that bedtime will ever get better, the parenting therapist tells me that it has. After all, she reflects, I don’t feel like I’m in mortal peril when I’m stuck in a small, darkened room with a screaming child anymore. “I actually do feel like that a lot. I’m just better at breathing through it now,” I tell her. “Well, that’s progress.” “Maybe,” I say, “but I don’t want to just be better at coping. I want it to be easier.” I am paying you to end this suffering, not help me bear it, I want to say. But this feels petty, and misplaced, so I keep it to myself. Coping skills are useful, I suppose, even when one would rather not to have to cope anymore.

Another parent would find a way to make peace with the blankets, with the mayhem, or maybe, in light of their blissfully overwhelming love (and serotonin), even laugh at the ridiculousness of it. Maybe, when I’m back on meds, I’ll be able to. For now, one breath—and one blanket—at a time.

First published in the Federation of BC Writers Literary Contest 2024 Anthology
Photo Credit: Kaboompics on Pexels