THE VIEW FROM HERE

WHY CAN’T YOU BE A zBY EMILY MORRISON GOOD GIRL?

WHEN I WAS FIVE, my big sister and I shared a bedroom with twin beds covered in those thin chenille comforters that offered little weight or comfort. Pandas and kittens adorned my walls while Kurt Cameron and Def Leppard stared back from hers.

In this spastic array of animals and celebrities, I fought bedtime most nights. On one spectacular evening, I frantically jumped up and down on my bed because “they” had moved the Magnum PI time slot from 7 to 8 p.m.

My sister shook her head from her bed, her front row seat to my tantrum, as my parents looked on from the doorway.

“Why can’t you be more like Mary?” my mother asked. “Don’t you see how Mary is a good girl and going right to bed?”

I saw Mary alright. I saw how she was a good girl. But I wasn’t Mary.

So I wailed on over all the injustices of enforced bedtimes and random programming changes on network television.

Eventually, the crisis passed. Either my parents caved, or I cried it out.

This scenario, caving or crying, played out repeatedly over a series of weeks. Somedays I cuddled on the couch for an extra hour with Mom, and some nights I sobbed while my sister covered her ears under her thin little blanket.

When my turn came to witness my own children’s fits of rage, they were calm. Surprisingly, there was no crying it out — only co-slumbering in our king-sized bed.

As Addie, my oldest, turned four, my son Jack came squalling into the world. They slept on either side of me. Blessedly, my middle child, Meg, preferred her own miniature bed.

Whenever Jack woke up to nurse Addie would say, “Why won’t that baby stop cryin’? Make him stop cryin’ Mumma!”

Rather than quiet two upset children, one of them had to go, and it wasn’t Jack. Addie just had to sleep in her own big girl bed.

“Why can’t you be more like Meg and sleep by yourself? Don’t you see how Meg is a good girl and going right to bed?” I asked.

She saw Meg alright. She saw how Meg was sleeping in her own bed. But Addie wasn’t Meg.

So she wept over all the injustices of parental abandonment and third children unexpectedly coming into the world.

After much sleep deprivation, around midnight one night we changed the arrangement of our bedroom furniture and moved Addie’s big girl bed so she could see directly down the hall into our room.

This way she could stare at us staring at her until she fell asleep. As long as she could talk to us and see us and know we were right there, then she wouldn’t cry. Or not so much.

So we did this. Night, after night, after night.

And for all but one year before she left for college, this is where Addie slept, in a room covered in Demi Lovato and Taylor Swift posters on one side and painted rocks and nature scenes on the other.

Of course, through sickness, breakups and stress, my children have found their way back to my bed over the years, but only now when those days have dwindled am I beginning to understand how much they meant.

To feel their little hands pull on my arm, to absorb the blows of those baby-bird feet, to hear their sweet voices say, “Can I come sleep with you, Mumma?”

Knowing that to my children I am comfort, peace and safety, that’s everything.

So how did such a not-good girl come to be somebody else’s mum? How did my mum do it?

How did she show me what love was when she stood there and shook her head? Was it when she pulled me up on the couch as we watched Magnum ride off in his shiny red corvette? Or was it when she let me wail away?

I don’t know. Love is funny, isn’t it? It has a way of turning us bad girls good.