Cleaning House

This past week was been all about cleaning house, literally and figuratively. My rampage started with two seemingly unrelated events: I lost my house keys and Manika stopped sleeping through the night.

The house keys wouldn’t have been such a big deal except our neighbors said they saw them on the floor outside our apartment around seven in the evening on the day they went missing, but didn’t bother to knock or pick them. That night, they disappeared. The next day, a stranger came to the house with some story about laundry falling from an upstairs apartment (the number of which she’d wouldn’t provide). She stood at the door peering in to see what the apartment looked like / had. The ayi and I later deduced she was there to see if we were home, and if not, probably would’ve let herself in. I had the locks changed that night. But the whole experience reminded me that it’s every man for himself here in China, especially when you’re an expat.

It’s often the same when you’re a mom. Manika’s new night wakings were a follow-on to her illness. While she was sick, she and I slept in the same bed, and I indulged every bottle and snack request she wanted, regardless of the hour. She is better now, but has decided having me on twenty-four hour call is much more fun than sleeping by herself uninterrupted. So she’s been waking up at two to four hour intervals, and making me feel like my whole world is out of my control (or more like in hers).

So I took back my life this week, or at least tried. I cleaned every corner of the house, bought a larger than life key chain and a hook to hang it on, organized, catalogued, shopped to fill in gaps, cleaned out email accounts, cleaned out my calendar and eliminated all sorts of waste, cancelled events I knew I wouldn’t enjoy, and prepped for the new baby. All of that gave me a vague sense of stability, security, and order during the day.

But nights were a different story. It didn’t help that I discovered my ayi has been bribing Manika to pee in the potty with chocolate chips, about seven to ten a day (far more than my two to three allowance), and one night she confused pumpkin pie filling for pumpkin soup and double-sugared my daughter up at dinner time. At nine pm this week, Manika just wanted to do laps around the apartment. So, all peacefulness earned during the day was spent in the hour and a half it took her to go bed. It was a miserable cycle.

Last night was the last straw. My house was clean, everything was where I could find it, and I was ready for a final standoff with Manika. I took her out all day, gave her a one hour nap only, read her five of her favorite books, and kissed her about a dozen times to emphasize I loved her. Then I closed the lights, and per supernanny’s expert advice, sat down on the floor facing her bed, and tilted my face down to the floor so we wouldn’t make eye contact. Then I waited.

At first, she yawned hard. I thought maybe, just maybe, she would finally comply, close her eyes and I could quickly tiptoe out. But no such luck. The nightly requests went as follows: “Bottle” (said repeatedly in escalating fervor and volume), “rock please” (followed same pattern of bottle but with the added drama of tears, “mommy’s bed” (accompanied by a chorus of screams and tears), “daddy” (emphasized with a few tugs to my hair and fists to my shoulders), and finally, the heart killer, “mommy hold you” (which means mommy hold me, but she doesn’t have her me’s and you’s down yet). To each request, I gently said no, hugged and kissed her and said “mommy loves you but you have to sleep now. Then I sat quietly until the temper tantrum ended. It was hell, especially because it was like the sixth time I’d done it and I was functioning on less sleep than a mother with a newborn.

So finally, in desperation, I did what I should’ve done much earlier – I prayed. Lately, I’ve been lax in praying for parenting strength and wisdom. In the beginning, it seemed I was on my knees almost every night, begging for the colicky torture to end. But I think my expectations were too high – my child never miraculously stopped crying until the books said she would, and pretty much everything else followed in the same internet-searchable fashion, which made me feel as if parenting was just some script you had to follow. Everyone took the same steps so prayer or no prayer, I’d go forward the same way regardless.

But last night was different. I was following a script, I had a rational plan in my head, but it was my heart that was faltering. I was tired, I was alone, and I was acutely aware that I was also alone in Shanghai. I couldn’t call my mother for help, I couldn’t count on a like-minded nanny to let me sleep in the morning the way I could in New York, and I certainly couldn’t lose my own temper the way Manika was because that would’ve just escalated everything. So I asked for God to help Manika sleep and then, when that was met with even louder shrieks from her bed, I prayed that God would keep me from strangling her. I tried to say the Lord’s prayer to myself, but that was simply too long to remember against the background noise, so finally I hummed in my head on old song, “Our God is an Awesome God.”

It was miraculous. Manika only fought me for thirty five minutes – a big reduction from the previous hour to an hour and a half, I walked away feeling less charred and beaten up, and my husband seemed to instinctively know I needed a hug (never happens!). Most importantly, Manika didn’t wake up through the night at all, and I felt internally cleansed this morning with rest, which was ultimately what I really needed.

I learned my lesson. I may be (or at least feel) alone in Shanghai at times and in motherhood, but I was reminded last night that, no matter what, I still always have God. He is truly everywhere, including my small block apartment in China.

Now if He could just help me get Manika to eat her vegetables.