A Mother Has A Thousand Eyes

They say that when a woman becomes a mother for the first time, she is gifted with a thousand eyes, so that she can watch over her child and keep her safe from harm.

What they don’t tell you is that as soon as you give birth, you lose the option of closing any two of those eyes at one time so that you can get a decent night’s sleep. As one who has lain awake during the toddler years, the early school years, the preteen years, and now, the pre-college madness, I can tell you that sleep lessons, or maybe just a gallon of warm milk, would be fabulous gifts for the mother of any age child.

The no-sleep syndrome began for me when my daughter was 2 and we went into New York to see the tree at Rockefeller Center. Our plan was to watch the ice skaters as long as we could stand the cold, and then go downstairs to the Promenade Café to indulge in their mammoth dish of chocolate ice cream. I was a Manhattanite transplanted to the suburbs, and my parents didn’t know any turf other than the upper East Side, so I thought it appropriate that my kid start life with an appreciation of my favorite city.

But the day turned out quite differently from the pleasure tour I expected. My daughter, always a cling peach, suddenly pulled her hand from mine and ran from the elevator as we waited to start our trip down from the street into Rockefeller Center.

I was shut inside the moving box. She was stranded alone on 51st Street. I screamed through the bronze doors, "Mia, stay where you are! Don’t move! I’ll be right there!" understanding that there was no way she could hear me as I descended into the bowels of the Deco building. Because of the timing of this ancient contraption, the elevator had to stop at the two interim floors before ascending, inch by dreadful inch. By the time we hit the street, I was drenched in my own sweat.

The door opened. There was Mia, standing confused and frightened beside a neatly dressed businessman who was holding an attaché case. He looked down at my child suspiciously, as though she were an alien he might have to fight off or bring home for a meal. I grabbed her up and clutched her, cooing and crying and swearing I would never let her out of my sight again. I didn’t sleep through the night for months after that, and in the years that followed, my REM cycles got longer and my deep, relaxing cycles shorter.

Over the years, I learned a few sleep tricks, but recently, on a cold night just after her eighteenth birthday, it all started up again. We live in a suburb of Princeton, New Jersey, and she had decided to drive into town on this particular night to meet me at the movies so that we could spend an evening together, just us girls. We chose "Chicago," because we are both nuts for movie musicals, and although she had seen the film the previous week, she wanted to share it with me.

I parked about a block away from the theater and called her on her cell to let her know I’d get the tickets. We had a quick meal, relished every minute of the film, then went for a coffee afterwards to sit and chat like the pals we had become.

We walked out into the freezing night and hurried down the block. The few pedestrians who had been hanging out in front of the coffee shop disbanded. There was no one else on the street. "Where are you parked?" I asked. "Do you want me to walk you to your car?"

"No, that’s okay," she responded. "I’ll see you at home."

And with that, she strode off around a deserted side street. I couldn’t see her anymore. I started toward my own car, walking down a block parallel to the one she had taken. And as though it would help, I began whistling a song from the score of the movie, as loudly as I possibly could, in some way doing what I had done so many years ago… trying to imagine her safe, protecting her from the inevitable monsters who lurked in the shadows, being the Mommy who could watch over her and be there for her all the time.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. For a few hours I hung around in bed, then eventually, made my way downstairs to putter until the sky was light. She lay upstairs in the room above me, and I could imagine her dreaming, ticking off the days when she would make her escape from childhood and start her adventure without parental involvement, free of Smotherhood, as a dear old friend liked to call it.

She can go where she likes. My thousand eyes will be ever watchful, holding the vision of her while I yawn a little, and maybe, finally, as the sun comes up, learn to relax.