A dark and stormy night
IN the movie The Sound of Music, there is a terrible storm. After a deafening clap of thunder, one child runs in to Maria’s room — then another and another until all of them arrive, seeking comfort from the thunder and lightning.
In the early hours of last Monday morning there was a significant electrical storm in Geelong. At approximately 12.30am there was a clap of thunder so loud that it startled me from my sleep. The storm was spectacular.
Our daughters didn’t stir. Our son Harvey stumbled into our room. He was disoriented and mildly miffed at being woken by the storm, but once he realised that we were up he sleepily shuffled back to his room. No need for comfort there. Not so for our dog Alfie. He bolted up the stairs from his futon, crying, whimpering and demanding a cuddle.
Alfie is an Airedale. He is not a small dog, weighing in at approximately 35kg. And the height of his head, we discovered that morning, was exactly the same height as our faces as they rest on our pillows in our bed — which was convenient for him to repetitively wake us over the next few hours with a wet nose or lick to the face.
Alfie is not allowed upstairs. On that night, however, whenever the thunder clapped or the lightning lit up the sky, he would run as fast as he could upstairs. Once sufficiently comforted, cuddled and cajoled he would take himself back to his bed downstairs — only to repeat this pattern again and again and again.
Harvey also returned to our room, but only to sleepily escort Alfie back to us. Alfie had, it seems, sought refuge in Harv’s room in addition to ours and was preventing Harv from sleeping by the regularity of his visits and the lick on his face that would announce each arrival.
As the storm moved away from Geelong, Alfie moved himself back downstairs and settled on to his futon. Clearly, however, he was not feeling tired.
Alfie loves to steal things and demolish them. We have, over the past two years, lost four or five pairs of shoes. Thongs are his favourite. Dolls, stuffed toys, an exercise bike and the exterior weatherboards have all fallen victim to the chewing habits of our naughty dog.
And so, while half asleep at approximately 3.30am, I heard him chewing something and imagined all the precious items he could have stolen from the children’s rooms and was now devouring.
This time it was I who was running downstairs, only to find him munching on the clown wig with which Georgia loved at one time to play dress-ups. For his next course he was planning to devour the Harry Potter Hedwig toy. Both had been stolen from Georgia’s room.
I surveyed downstairs to make sure there was no other contraband, threw him a rawhide bone and stumbled back upstairs, managing to return to sleep at about 4am — only to be woken half an hour later by my husband’s alarm as he got up to catch an early flight.
Debriefing later in the day, we realised that we have finished that phase of our life where broken sleep and busy nights attending to one or multiple little children is a constant.
Between the three children, there were years where last Sunday night was the norm. Where three consecutive hours of sleep was a bonus. Where often two of our three small people would invade the bed and you would wake after a kick in the head or with someone sleeping horizontally on top of you, rather than vertically next to you.
While I do not miss the sleep deprivation, I discovered on Monday — while possibly still in a sleep- deprived psychosis — that I do miss the cuddles and the chaos and the sense of team as you negotiated, exhausted, night after night, who was going to get up and get them back to bed.
On that stormy night in Austria when all the children came to her for comfort, Maria sung that when she was feeling bad, she simply remembered her favourite things. Who knew that with some time and restoration of sleep deficit, I would look back on those years of sleepdeprived exhaustion not as some of my favourite things but at least with a modicum of love and fondness. Rachel Schutze is a principal of Gordon Legal, wife and mother of three. [Ed’s note: Ms Schutze is married to Corio MP Richard Marles.]