The Bedtime That Wasn't

Newsletter 2024-01-05

My kids have a bedtime. It’s just that no one is quite sure when it is. You’d think that I, as their father, would know the exact time since I’m the one responsible for enforcing it, yet nothing could be further from the truth. There’s a theoretical number, a more realistic number, and also a giant question mark for everything that happens after I fall asleep. The disparity proves once and for all that I’m not in charge in this house. I just work here. My kids are the ones running the show.

Technically, the bedtime for all four of my children is 8:30 p.m.. That’s reasonable for some of them and grossly unfair for the rest. It seems like a normal time for my nine-year-old, Lucy, and eight-year-old, Waffle. The more hours I can keep them unconscious, the better. They’re never up to anything good after dark. Something about the setting sun triggers the extreme need for wrestling matches and races through the house. My thirteen-year-old, Betsy, on the other hand, actually needs to stay up later. Last semester, she had a daily assignment to write down what she saw on NBC Nightly News, which she had to watch live on their free live stream. If she missed the initial broadcast, which was in the middle of dinner, she couldn’t see it until it was uploaded to YouTube at 10 p.m.. The only alternative was to sign up for a Hulu Live package, which allowed for instant replays for the low, low price of a hundred dollars a month. To paraphrase the great philosopher Meatloaf, I’ll do anything for my kids, but I won’t do that. Next year, Betsy will be in high school, and her grades will matter. I should put “matter” in quotation marks. Truthfully, these arbitrary metrics can’t define your value as a human being, but in more practical terms, they can determine where you’ll go to college and how much it will cost when you get there. In a family with exactly nothing saved for higher education, that’s kind of a big deal. Betsy can say she’s staying up “for homework” and get a free pass to stay awake as late as she wants. All that school work is teaching her something after all, even if it’s only how to pull one over on her parents.

My eleven-year-old, Mae, is the wild card.