Alligator, Go Away!

One of the most interesting things about parenting, as I’m sure it is for just about everyone, is seeing bits of yourself in your child.  Reliving childhood experiences, yet handling them through the prism of parenthood, is eerie, yet fascinating.

Almost every night as Anna and I have our bedtime “huggle” (one of my favorite of her original words), I repeat the now familiar mantra: “Alligator, go away! Leave my Annapie alone!”  Anna smiles and closes her eyes contentedly …. until they pop open again approximately 10 seconds later.

Anna's non-imaginary alligator, "Aaron"

“Can you say ‘alligator go away’ again, mom?”

And so it happens that I continue to threaten Anna’s nameless, imaginary alligator so that he will leave her bedroom and not nibble her feet or whatever it is that she thinks he’s going to do. Occasionally, she is bold enough to join in and to look out for my well-being too: “Go away, alligator! This is MY mom!”

I never had an imaginary alligator as a child. I did, however, hang out with weird, imaginary guys named (and I’m not kidding) Action, Dehydrate and Son of a Gun. My only comfort in sharing something as embarrassing as that is that perhaps not many people will actually read it!  Anyway, I too created friends in my mind to keep me company and make mischief, but I don’t think I did it as early as Anna has. What has been interesting for me is the alligator’s evolution from a friend who went to the grocery store with us to get candy, to a menacing creature who rears his ugly head at nighttime to snap at our feet. How did THAT happen?

Nighttime fears are, of course, something every child experiences. When I was about 6, I had a horrible fear that someone would climb in my bedroom window and kidnap me or hurt me. I developed this fear after I read a newspaper headline about a local “cat burglar.”  That ordinary phrase seared itself into my brain and that cat burglar became my personal boogeyman. I haunted my poor parents’ bedroom almost nightly for a good three years or so, until my parents got me a radio, turned on the easy listening station, and refused to let me out of my room at night no matter how much I yelled and cried.  How could they be so cruel?! I had no choice but to tremble in my bed and subconsciously absorb the lyrics to Air Supply songs until I passed out from the exhaustion of the drama of it all. Every single night. For a LONG time.

At least I learned a lot of songs that way. But I still think it’s ironic that “Even the Nights Are Better” played so often.

Anna's non-imaginary alligator, "Aaron"

Of course, now I understand the importance of being alert enough at work in the morning not to fall asleep on one’s desk. There is no tired feeling like the one you get after you are awakened by your child’s cry about 7 times during the night. I’m sure it wasn’t that my parents wanted to be mean or that they didn’t care about my fears – they simply had to find some way to help me get through the night, for my health and their sanity.

Whether that nighttime trauma had something to do with the anxiety I’ve faced in later years is a question I’ll save for my shrink.  Thankfully, Anna’s alligator is nowhere near as problematic, although she’s also developing concerns about shadows. What I’m wondering is, how can I handle her fears in a way that makes her feel safe and secure but doesn’t result in even more severe sleep deprivation for me?  Confrontations with the alligator suffice for now, but what happens when that stops working?

I don’t have the answer to this question – maybe you do. Maybe there isn’t one. Just in case (and because history repeats itself), I have already preemptively created a nighty-night playlist for Anna on my iPod, including classics from Elton John, Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder.  However, I don’t think this will be enough to keep that mean old alligator at bay. All I know is that I hope I handle these worries in a way that makes my little girl feel secure…and perhaps provides enough subconscious knowledge to enable her to win Rock & Roll Jeopardy someday.