Does a tiara come with that title?

While I can’t say for sure that there was any kind of official voting or anything, I think that it is clear by this evening’s problems that I am, in fact, the World’s Worst Mother.

I have two children and tonight (it is 1:20 am now) neither of them has slept for more than about an hour at a stretch. And because they haven’t coordinated their wakings (or maybe they have and this is just part of the plan) it has been a seemingly endless up-and-down-every-twenty-minutes-or-so kind of night and I don’t have enough Paxil in my system to take anymore.

This is not to say that I haven’t tried to be a good mother, the kind that has children who do things like sleep at night. In fact, I have tried to walk a perfect line between the Dr. Sears school of non-stop comfort and support, and the Ferber camp’s goals of self-reliance and self-soothing. As it turns out, I have been an awful failure all the way around.

When Emily was born we co-slept partly for it’s ease with nursing and partly because at the time we were living in a tiny one bedroom apartment in the Twin Cities and there weren’t a lot of places to put her. Once we moved to the land of more than reasonable real estate prices she had her own room and crib and she took to them both with ease.

That is until the move to the “big girl bed” almost a year ago. The child we could put down awake, kiss goodnight, and shut in her own room has turned into the child that fears everything. Now our evenings consist of lying next to Emily for as long as it takes until she falls asleep. Some nights the routine is fifteen minutes, other nights there are hours of mind-numbing questions (generally a perfectly good, yet poorly timed question that is answered patiently and completely followed by “Huh?” or the exact same question that was just answered) and performances of the entire score of The Sound of Music done while lying on her back in the swirling acid trip colors of the Disney Princess nightlight.

Then once she is asleep and the sweet, sweet sounds of The Daily Show theme song begin to echo through the living room and replace the grating “So long, farewell…” in my head I hear it: the amplified cries of Claudia on the monitor.

Claudia. Poor child number two. Honestly she has gotten the short end of the stick since day one. While portraits were taken of Emily at birth, 3, 6, 9, 12 and 18 months, and two and three years, Claudia got them only a birth, 4 and 7 months. She is now 14 months old and if the other mother’s knew how poorly I have performed just the chronicling portion of my motherly duties they would be calling DHS right now.

Anyway, back to the sleeping, or lack thereof. Claudia has never even been introduced to a crib. She wouldn’t have the first clue what such a thing might be used for. She is still nursed to sleep in our bed in basically the same manner as she was from day one, and by that I mean about fifteen times a night. What in god’s name have I been thinking this last year? Isn’t the idea to learn from your experiences? Not, apparently, in our household. We seem to live by the idea that if you narrowly avert an awful traffic accident through sheer dumb luck, the next time you head to the store you should just close your eyes, hit the gas and go. Why bother with things like decision-making and critical thinking?

So here we are with the girls: the one that has deviated from the track, and the one that has never even heard of the track. And the parents: the dad that wants to blow off steam with a little video game action, and the mom that just wants a little time without children on her to sit agape at the condition of the world as brought to her by Jon Stewart.

Is it too much to ask that children turn out despite the best efforts of their parents?

The ersatz sounds coming from the monitor say yes. Here we go again.