I went to visit my daughter – well, as always, the picture is vivid! – says fifty-five-year-old Barbara. – Everything is strewn everywhere, the dishes haven’t been washed since morning, the laundry is souring in the machine, it was washed yesterday, and no one bothered to hang it up. I am not even talking about these toys, you have to step over them at every step… I came, knocked on the door – no one opened, I called – and she, you see, is asleep! The child fell asleep during the day, and she was with her. And with a complaint to me – I just fell asleep and you woke me up!..
Barbara’s daughter, twenty-seven, has been married for a long time, is herself a mother of a two-year-old daughter, lives separately from her parents, is fully supported by her husband, and does not expect or ask for help. She copes with the child herself, and her grandmother only comes to her granddaughter once every two months to play and “make a goat”. And along the way, she points out to her daughter that she is living in all the wrong ways.
And the daughter is sure that if something suddenly goes wrong in her life, her mother will support, protect, shelter, and give her daughter and granddaughter her last chance. But in peacetime, when her daughter is doing well, her mother is not happy all the time.
A stumbling block has become daytime sleep.
The daughter has a difficult daughter – nervous, excitable, still often waking up at night. Of course, it is much easier now than it was when she was a baby. Nevertheless, she still has a couple of times a night to get up, give her daughter some water, put her down again. So the young mother adapted to sleep with her baby during the day – in the first days after the hospital otherwise it was just not possible to survive, and now it really helps. Cleaning and laundry can be done later. But to rest – only when there is an opportunity. Plus, my daughter sleeps much better with her mom. And this is the key to a good mood baby in the evening.
Mom does not accept it. It is just at a physical level, irritated by this habit.
– Well, how is it – a healthy adult to go to sleep in broad daylight? Okay with a newborn baby, but now? Don’t you have anything better to do? Look around you, do the dishes, hang the laundry, what’s there to do? Sleeping during the day is out of the question! You’re still thirty years old, and you’re a wimp! You’ve eaten and fallen asleep… You’ll start mooing so soon! When I was your age – wow! You were in nursery school when you were a year old, and I was working full-time. It would never have occurred to me to sleep during the day!
Mom sincerely admires the familiar women who sleep little, work hard and heroically overcome life’s difficulties. For example, her colleague travels every day from the far suburbs, gets up at five in the morning. A neighbor pulls two children alone, works part-time as a cleaner in an office building – from six in the morning until eight there, then she goes to her main job, she is also good.
Almost all working women rise to the stove after their shift and cook and fry food for tomorrow until midnight, sleeping five hours a day. Her daughter, on the other hand, sleeps for two hours every day without any remorse, and she does not see anything awful in it. Mom is just jealous, she thinks. At their age, motherhood was much harder. No one spent three years on maternity leave, doing laundry by hand, standing in lines, sewing and knitting, and everywhere else, there were problems – with cooking, with products, with basic household chemicals, which it was not. Of course, what kind of daytime sleep was there…
But maybe sleeping during the day is really a sign of degradation or some health problems?
It turns out that the adult lives by the regime of a two-year-old. Big deal, night rises! Daughter does not unload railroad cars, and to raise a single child plus a household for three people in a modern apartment is not such a big challenge that she has to roll her face into the pillow at the first opportunity.
Or is being tired on maternity leave and sleeping during the day the norm?
