Dear children,
I, the undersigned parent, being of absolutely unsound and exhausted mind and body, do solemnly promise that:
1. I will wee at night and not flush the toilet or wash my hands for fear of stirring one of you inhuman awake machines.
2. I will sleep in the spare room on a bed with no sheets and a coat for a duvet because all of you have snuggled into bed with Mammy and there’s no room for me anymore.
3. I will go to bed at 8pm because, if I do, there’s a chance I will get three hours sleep before one of you has a bad dream or sees a monster or forgets where the toilet is.
4. I will have total heart failure when I wake up from the feeling that someone is watching me and you are just standing at the end of my bed, silhouetted by the landing light, clutching a dolly and looking like the DVD cover of Paranormal Activity 6.
5. I will lie on the floor of your room with my hand poked in between the bars of your cot because you won’t go to sleep unless I’m actually touching you. Yes, I’ve tried replacing my hand with a teddy but you can somehow sense the lack of life in it, you hyper-aware human.
6. I will weep with unbridled joy when someone offers to take you on a sleep over.
7. I will wait with terror to hear whether your crying about your duvet being ‘too fluffy’ has woken your brother.
8. I will whisper monosyllabic answers to any friend who would dare call my phone after 7pm until they just get bored and go away and I can go back to watching The Walking Dead with the sound turned down and the subtitles on. Incidentally, reading “Zombie groans and eats screaming man” isn’t as scary as you’d think.
9. I will make up my own nighttime songs, with your name in them, to make you happy and then nod off. I will think to myself that these songs are actually really good. I will decide to make a website offering personalised lullabies to exhausted parents for €9.99 a pop and be a millionaire by Christmas next year. I will fall asleep on the floor in your room. I will wake up a few hours later with a sore back and decide that I’m too tired to make a website or write songs and I think I was actually just singing “Happy Sleepday To You” anyway.
10. I will forgive you all of the pain, exhaustion, premature ageing and tears that come with a lack of sleep because, when it’s morning time and you smile at me, you make my heart sing and it all goes away.
PS – this is me:
I am David Zachary John Moore. I am married to Tracy (who used to be Velcro Girl on 2Phat). We have four kids: Andrew is five, Samuel is nearly three, Nina and Anna, the babies, are one-year-old twins. We have a dog called Lorna, a lurcher we rescued in 2005. She can leap a nine-foot wall in one go. I am tired.
