Your Turn By KELLY H. JOHNSON

P.O.W. When Parenting Secrets Get Revealed “So, what do you do?” she asks. And thus an essay is born.

I am a barely functioning mother of four and have been for a good many years now. My dysfunction is largely due to the fact that all of my kids are what I will generously call “night people.”
Based on the age of my oldest child, I estimate I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since about 1994.
Last night my two youngest children woke up every hour on the hour, like tandem alarm clocks gone mad, and it has left me tired to the point of feeling just the slightest bit deranged. I try to keep hold of all the details I know I will need to get through the day, but I can already feel them escaping, like leaves off the back of a fast-moving truck.

This is nothing new. I actually keep a note taped to the inside of my car that says, “Count Your Children!” And I do. Every time I get in or out of the car and each time I leave a store. That is how unglued I feel—like it is possible I might drive off from somewhere without one of them.
My friends insist I’m perfectly normal; however, evidence to the contrary continues to mount: to wit, I forgot to buy my children costumes for Halloween, I’ve lost my son’s book report—twice—and yesterday I almost took the antibiotics prescribed for the cat.
These things strike me as being a little to the left of normal. At the very least, they seem to be the sorts of things most folks manage to avoid.

This past Christmas, I pulled off a real doozy—one for the record books. It was mid-December and, with my son’s kindergarten music program less than a week away, I decided it was probably time to dig through the mountain of papers that had accumulated on my kitchen counter and find the newsletter his teacher had sent home weeks earlier.
I gave it a quick read, taking note of the reminder to “dress the children appropriately” for the show.
“A bit vague,” I thought, but I dug around and found some dark blue pants and a bright red shirt with a navy collar for my son to wear.
I arrived at school on the big day with his younger siblings in tow. We nabbed three seats in the first row and I settled back to enjoy some priceless holiday entertainment.
But when the pint-size performers began to file in, my anticipation turned to horror. One by one they came, some tall, some short, some blonde, some brunette, but all of them sporting crisp, white shirts. Correction—all of them, except one.
For the next 30 (excruciating) minutes, I watched my son sing his heart out on stage—a lone figure in bright red against an unrelenting sea of white.

I called my dad when I got home, ready to throw in the towel. “I’m too damn tired to think straight!” I whined into the phone.
A retired Navy Captain, he said not to feel bad, that sleep deprivation was real and was used routinely by the military to wear prisoners down during war-time interrogations.
“We must have the whole world’s secrets by now,” I joked. But the truth was, it felt like the world had just uncovered all of my secrets, as though my every shortcoming had been laid bare in front of this army of parents and their ivory-clad minions.
With no relief in sight, I did what any semi-sane mother would have done. I surrendered to my three benevolent captors and their red-shirted leader in hopes that I could negotiate for a nap.
Kelly H. Johnson stays awake in the West End of Richmond with her husband, Fred, and their children.

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