Mama Versus The Monsters

Kids and the night-time terrors

Sep 23, 2021

I do not want to alarm you, friends, but there are monsters in my house. They seem to cluster mostly in my five-year-old’s bedroom, they don’t respond to intervention, and it’s unclear what they want, but it’s nothing good.

There should be an award, given mockingly to parents like me who are dumb enough to believe that they have escaped some painful rite-of-parenting-passage, simply because it hasn’t happened to them yet. Until a few weeks ago, I thought our son was just not the kind of kid who has nightmares or is afraid of the dark, because it had never come up. But as sure as they will get pubic hair some day, it seems that all children go through this at some point in their little lives.

We have been dealing with this for a few weeks now. Not nightmares, exactly, but a complaint, beginning at bedtime and lasting sometimes until our kiddo is sleeping next to us in our bed, where the monsters dare not go. We are tired. He is tired. The monsters have not been swayed by the “monster spray” (facial toner) I administered around the bed. They quickly undid the calming work of many night-time guided meditations. They are not deterred by a string of battery-powered Christmas lights. And they do not give a shit about "there’s no such thing as monsters.”

i have actually never seen ghost but do they do it???

What to do?? If our kid is not special, that means we’re not alone! In the Kindergarten pick-up line, a dad reveals that his son has just started having horrible nightmares. The pediatrician suggested a “dream journal” by his bed, plus no screens two hours before lights out, which is fine, because my child has never seen a screen and when he asks to use our phones we yell “go and work on your knitting!”

We went straight to Walgreen’s and I let Max pick out a marbled composition notebook. He decided he would draw the monsters and then cross them out when he was not afraid of them anymore. He never made it to that point. The next night, I placed his lovies around his room like sentries, at various locations he felt were particularly vulnerable. This might have made things worse, as it created a lot of weird shadows to wonder about. This article about kids and nightmares reassures me that it is common, and recommends that I not make fun of my child’s fears. Oh, fine. A lot of people suggest that we make sure our child is getting enough sleep, as exhaustion can cause nightmares. But he’s not getting enough sleep because of the monsters, so…

I have always had trouble with the sleep-times. It takes me a long to fall asleep, I am a total mess getting out of bed in the morning, and, now that I am old AF, I wake up at the slightest disturbance in the night and have to repeat the cycle of winding down again. When I was little, I remember tucking every inch of my body under the covers, tight, so that nothing could do me harm. I remember staying up for hours with my little brother in our shared room, performing puppet shows in the slats between our beds and laughing about butt-stuff. I remember my parents instituting an innovative program of “sleeping-through-the-night-treats,” to be awarded to any of us who had the willpower to stay in our rooms until dawn. And each of us can describe how we deployed that willpower, sometimes without success, as we stood in our doorways, peering longingly down the long, shadowy hallway towards our mother’s room, considering the benefits of a Snickers bar for someone who has already been eaten alive by ghouls. I never slept alone as a child, I still find it highly creepy, and all of this is to say that I understand, both biologically and relationally, why my son tosses and turns and whines and appears suddenly, often naked, at our bedside at all hours of the night.

I called my mother and step-father, remembering my own experiences at this stage, to ask what they did. My mother spoke vividly of my brother’s nighttime fears—which began with monsters, moved on to mobsters (we did grow up in Boston in the 80’s), and culminated in, of all things, giant fish. She said she would comfort him and tell him there was no such thing (she probably didn’t get into the whole mobsters bit). When I asked if that worked she said, not really, she probably had to do this three times a night for more than a year.

My step-father, who studied Jungian psychology and claims to have “piles” of old dream journals, which I believe, had more mystical advice. When his sons were afraid of the dark or its minions, he summoned the latin phrase “similia similibus curantur” (he summons latin phrases a lot), which means “like cures like.” Telling a scared child that they have nothing to worry about is like telling an acne-prone teenager that no one is looking at their face. Instead of trying to be practical, he leaned into the fantasy. Jung used an ancient greek term “temenos,” which means sacred or protected space, to describe the sanctity of the therapist-patient relationship, as well as the \ places in the psyche that need to be contained. Standing in his son’s bedroom, which they both accepted as highly vulnerable to monsters, my step-father created a temenos around the room, even went outside and made a circle around the whole house, waving his hands like a lunatic, and also like a sweet father willing to take his child’s concerns at face value.

a photoshopped recreation of the world’s oldest temenos

Last night, Max consented to having a temenos built around his bedroom, and, at his request, around me and his father (he didn’t seem concerned that the monsters might get to his little sister). Standing in his room, surrounded by stuffed-animal guards and strings of safety lights, I waved my hands like a lunatic, speaking to the air, to the monsters, to the mythical veil, and commanding them, in my “mean mama” voice, not to pass.

When I checked on him just a few minutes after lights out, he was fast asleep with his book spread out in his lap. Correlation does not equal causation, I seem to recall from my student days, but I am crediting Carl Jung and the ancient Greeks with this one. Then, in the middle of the night, after I had finally dozed off, a pale specter came to me, complaining of itchy mosquito bites, which are very much of this world. I grumbled and made threats about this being the last time, but I didn’t want to be alone either, so I handed over half of the comforter. I don’t know what we will try tonight, or if we’ll just stop trying and let him pass through this thing in his own time. I forget about the giving in sometimes, that that is also a choice. And I forget that entering a child’s world is the best way to relieve them of pressure, though it’s so easy to fall back on reason and other weapons of adulthood. If you happen to see me on the street outside my building tonight, by the light of the moon, waving my hands and chanting in ancient Greek, feel free to say hi. Better yet, join me.

Mama Versus The Monsters

Kids and the night-time terrors

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