I'm awake

It's 1:15 in the morning. I can tell this because I've squinted hard at the clock on the shelf next to my dresser clear on the other side of the room. It would be easier to tell the time if the clock were on the bedside table, but my husband needs it to be farther away from the bed so that when the alarm goes off in the morning he has to get out of bed to hit the snooze button. He usually does this three or four times every day. It seems to work for him.

I can hear him speaking now through the door to our room. He's in the hallway and he's talking to Nick. I know this because he's telling him to pick up the clothes in his room and brush his teeth and get to bed. He's probably just come home from working late and has done the usual perimeter walk through the house, checking on the boys and telling them to get off their computers for the night. He's hates this. He says it feels like whenever he sees them he has to yell at them.

I've wrestled with this, too, but it's not as hard for me. The kids are home schooled so I see them all day long. Not all of the time spent with them is nagging time. Sometimes it's fun stuff, like a park day or club day with other home schooled kids. Sometimes it's a field trip, although that happens less often now that they're both in high school.

It's harder to find field trips that are interesting to teenagers. The last one was supposed to be a tour of a recording studio but because the owner's sound engineer didn't make it in to work that day, it devolved into a monologue about the owner's early days in the music business and how, since his voice is gone, he likes to encourage good looking young women to come and sing on his cable tv show. It was educational, all right, just not in the way I'd anticipated.

I hear the thumping up and down the hallway of my oldest son, Sam, as he reluctantly performs a regular Thursday night chore, emptying the wastebaskets. I notice that he's avoiding emptying the wastebasket in my room. He probably thinks I'm sleeping through all of this. I wish I could.

Briefly I consider doing some thumping of my own, out into the kitchen, perhaps, where I could make a cup of cocoa in a put upon manner and inflict some guilt where it would do the most good. I decide I'm really too tired to get up. Maybe I'll read for a while. I flip on the light next to the bed and pick up a dog-eared copy of "Interesting Times" by Terry Pratchett. I love Pratchett. He makes me laugh and I can use a laugh or at least a grin right about now. Damn it. I was sleeping so well, too.

My sister says that when I was young I used to thump up and down the halls when I was mad, just like my kids do now. My dad called me Thumper, which usually made me stomp even harder. I was slow to pick up on teasing back then. I had a hair trigger temper as a teenager, too. My dad seemed to delight in provoking it, or maybe it just seemed like it to me.

I hear footsteps approaching the end of the hall. Will whoever it is notice that there's a light on in my bedroom and feel all contrite or something? The steps recede again. Obviously, nobody's worried about cutting in on anybody's sleep time tonight.

I read for a while and eventually my eyes close more than they stay open and I put the book down and turn out the light. Whatever fireworks were inspired by my husband's return home are all over for this evening. I can sleep, hopefully the boys will sleep, and eventually my husband will sleep. No more drama, not even from me, Thumper.