Another Amuse Bouche tale…
My 2.5-year-old son Sebastian was the first superhero to sleep in our bed. As our intrepid Tiger Boy—with his lightning movements and ferocious roar—he has reigned over our king-sized mattress for more than a year. After a long day of battling the perils of toddler-dom and staring imaginary monsters in their eyes, he often falls asleep to the cadence of his favorite book—Ten Little Dinosaurs—being read aloud to him.
It’s tough being a superhero. With so much more of the world to conquer, Tiger Boy tries to resist sleep. However, by the seventh dinosaur and its silly antics, Sebastian grumbles and purrs; he curls his body against my side. He strokes my arm with his cheek until the cublike growls turn into chest rumbles from dreamland. Several hours later, after my husband, Skerdi, and I have fallen asleep, Sebastian finds a position, in which he’s most comfortable—usually one that discomfits us. He lays perpendicular to us, with one foot burrowing itself into his dad’s side and the other trying to make its way into his mouth. His head, on the other hand, often worms its way into my left armpit. During the night, Skerdi and I find our way to the edges of our large bed. It is rather obvious that sleep—the uninterrupted, revitalizing kind—has eluded us for a long time. Would we ever get it back?
A few weeks ago, my son befriended another superhero. You may have heard of him: Spiderman. Sebastian and his red and blue action figure are best pals. They have shared baths and talked to each other in a different language; although, I do think their conversations were rather one-sided with my son hogging the discussion. I have even read bedtime books to both of them, until Tiger Boy and Spiderman doze off on the king-sized pillow they share.
The latter always seemed to be the first to snooze. Sebastian always pulled the flat sheet we’d been using as a blanket during the summer over his friend. When asked if Spidey was cold, Sebastian would hush me, “Shhh. Spiderman sleeping Mommy.”
Parents, pediatricians and child psychologists debate the benefits of co-sleeping. Skerdi and I, however, come from cultures where it is widely accepted. What would experts think, though, of bedtime routines involving superheroes? I would hazard a guess that one wouldn’t give any cause for worry. But what about six of them?
Shortly after meeting Spiderman, Sebastian and his altar ego, Tiger Boy, started rolling with a crew of other friends endowed with special abilities. One of them was the caped crusader, Batman, who vies for my son’s attention. Every morning, Sebastian has a clothing crisis as he has to choose between the Spiderman and the Batman tee to wear to school. The Thing and his rocky musculature has also joined the unique clique that also embraced one of the Transformer robots and an Owl of Ga Hoole.
Like many toddlers his age, Sebastian divides the world into big people (like Mom and Dad) and little people (like himself and his friend at daycare). There is no such thing as good guys and bad guys. Villainy is non-existent. It didn’t surprise me that in his daily summit of superheroes, the Joker is treated as an equal participant. Maybe it was his winning smile that charmed my son into accepting him, much to the chagrin of his now frenemy Batman. Nevertheless, the league of seven superheroes, led by Tiger Boy, conquer the world of imagination and embark on adventures together. On their down time, they sit around sipping milk and babble about the future, which is usually what the other six will do the next day while Sebastian goes off to day care, where no one is aware of his secret identity.
A week or so ago, Sebastian demanded that his friends observe proper hygiene habits. He forced them to take bubble baths with him so I could scrub them all clean. As part of their superhero training, Sebastian insisted that they must listen to me read and sing songs. Inadvertently, they would drift, one by one, into slumber. As their leader, Tiger Boy was always last to sleep. He ensured that none of his men was cold by covering them with the blanket. He warned me to be quiet before he quietly succumbed to exhaustion—one arm lying protectively across his extraordinary friends. When I try to moved the six of them from the one pillow on which they rested, Sebastian swatted my hand away.
The night Sebastian and his league of superfriends first slept in our bed, Skerdi was oblivious to the uninvited guests. The toys had been pushed into the crevice of between the headboard and the mattress. On the second evening, however, Skerdi had a rude awakening as he came to bed after a long night of studying. When he entered our bedroom,the only light was from the digital clock. It was midnight, and I was just entering the first phase of sleep. Suddenly, a loud yelp of pain pierced the silent darkness.
Oh no, he stubbed his toe again, I thought. I sat up and switched on the light. Skerdi was holding Spiderman with two fingers.
“What is this,” he demanded.
I motioned for him to keep his voice down and answered, “It’s Spiderman.”
“I know who Spiderman is, but what is he doing in our bed?”
“Sleeping,” I answered as if it were a normal occurrence.
“Spiderman cannot…”
“Shhhh,” I interrupted, “Spiderman is sleeping. In fact all of them are.”
“What them?”
I pushed aside the covers and found the Joker, the Owl, the Thing and Batman scattered around the bed, mostly on my husband’s side. Skerdi smiled and then chuckled. He looked down at his snoring Tiger Boy in his tiger pajamas. These were his pals. Skerdi placed a knee on the bed and tried to crawl across it to plant a kiss on his son’s cheek.
Then he yelped again, “Ow, what the…?!”
He looked down. His other knee had landed on the knobby robot. “Are there any more?”
I shook my head. “It’s so funny. I don’t even know how Sebastian got into Spiderman and superheroes. He doesn’t watch any cartoons about them. I don’t think he even knows that Spidey can shoot out a web.”
“I thought all kids knew about superheroes from a young age.”
“No,” I replied, “MZ’s son started his obsession with Spiderman only last year, when he was five.”
“Maybe Sebastian learned it from [brothers] Paolo and Niccolo. They are into all that comics and graphic novels.”
“Paolo has yet to open his hermetically sealed collection of comics, and if Nic did show anything to Sebastian it would be Japanese anime—at least the appropriate kind, like Hello Kitty or Voltes 5.”
Skerdi stared blankly at me. “I don’t know what those are.”
I had forgotten that growing up in Albania during the waning years of communism limited his exposure to Western (and Japanese) pop culture. “Honey, did you know about Spiderman and Batman growing up?”
Skerdi shook his head. He explained that the idea of superheroes—of individuals rising above others due to inherited or developed powers—was an anathema to communism.
“But what about the whole idea of ‘with great power comes great responsibility’?”
Not understanding the reference, Skerdi stared at me again, “The people were responsible to the State and vice versa.”
I could not imagine such a childhood. Mine was rich with make believe and alternate realities. So I pressed on, “But when you and your friends played, did you ever pretend to have powers?”
“No.”
“I did,” I said. “Mom and Dad didn’t give us many toys. So after school, my friends and I in the neighborhood used to play pretend superheroes.”
“And what were you?” Skerdi ruffled his son’s hair before aligning his little toy friends back on the pillow.
I told him how I used pretend I was chrono-girl, who could manipulate time and wore a big clock around my neck. I cocked an eyebrow up and asked, “If you could be a superhero or have superpower what would you be?”
“Ummmm, I don’t know.”
“How about Balkan Man, the name alone would terrorize people? Or maybe Techno-guy who could kill people through their computers or sound systems? During the day, you could work for the Geek Squad at Best Buy.”
Skerdi snorted. “And you, would you still be chrono-girl?”
“Nope,” I said resolutely. “Imagine if I were chrono-girl now, people would start calling me [rapper] Flavor Flav.”
We both laughed loudly, startling Sebastian, who whimpered and whined for us to be quiet. With eyes closed, he patted around him to feel if his friends were still there.
Skerdi pointed to the scene and said, “You need to figure that out. We can’t have all of them in bed with us. Sebastian is more than enough.”
The next evening as we got ready to sleep, Sebastian arranged all his friends around him again on the pillow, with Spiderman closest to him. Before I opened the first book, I cleared my throat and said, “Sebastian?”
“Yes, mommy?”
“Tonight, Spiderman, Batman, The Thing, the Owl, the Robot and Joker cannot sleep here in the bed.”
My boy’s eyes widened. An onrush of tears spilled out as he wailed. “No, Mommy, no!!”
I stroked his back and hugged him fiercely. “Listen, your friends have to work.”
Tears were still streaming down, but he managed to ask calmly, “Like Mommy? Like Daddy?”
“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “And why do we work?”
“For Sebi?” He hiccupped his response.
“Yup. Your friends are working to scare away monsters while you sleep.”
“Oh?” Although he looked like he understood, I wasn’t entirely sure.
“Sweetheart, at night, they will stay awake and when you are at Buddy’s house, at school, tomorrow, they will sleep. Do you understand?”
Sebastian looked over at his friends and then back at me. “Ok, Mommy.”
The night shift: Our gang of friends watch over Sebastian as he sleeps.
He gathered his toys and arranged them on my night table so that they faced the bed. “They go to work now. Good night to me.”
In the morning, Sebastian jumped up out of bed fifteen minutes before the alarm rang. He checked to see if his friends were still on the table. Smiling, he jumped down and greeted them good morning. Before he got dressed to go to school, as Sebastian not Tiger Boy, he arranged them all back on the now empty pillow and covered them with a blanket. “Good night. See you later.”
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