Divorce is stressful, and dealing with babies is stressful, but dealing with babies who won't sleep during a divorce can really rock your boat. When you're tired, alone, angry, broke, hurt and just generally miserable inside, you need your sleep. Unfortunately, babies seem to choose the worst possible times to keep us awake.

Sleep deprivation is insidious - as the days and nights blend together, it makes you go quietly crazy.

It's stressful, and it does make you crazy sometimes, but you cannot blame the babies. They are just sweet, innocent, guiltless little angels, entrusted to us as our own personal little blessings.

Like all blessings, we don't actually deserve them - they're a gift we have not earned. At least that's what they'd like for us to believe!

I say we are "pre-wired," because I personally can sleep through almost anything. Rain, thunder and lightening, dogs howling, loud mufflers . . . a third world revolution could go on outside my bedroom window and I'd miss it.

I generally sleep like I'm dead, blissfully unaware, unless and until a baby has that little hitch in their breathing, a slight change in tempo, anything, or perhaps not much of anything - suddenly, I'm wide awake. It's a wired in vulnerability that afflicts us all as parents I suppose.

The little guys do what they do, and we do what we do, and it's all okay - sort of. We get tired, cranky, perhaps a little delusional, and maybe even a wee bit paranoid - but we don't feel anything but tired. That's because we are parents, we are loving, we are trusting, we are tired - but we don't see what's actually going on. We don't see it, until the day they see fit to show us.

I was to that point on that night of revelation when my babies decided to show me what was really going on. I was exhausted the night when my little guys slept straight thru. I wasn't delusional, or paranoid; in fact, I was wonderfully perceptive - unusually so.

I layed awake in utter silence, listening to that quiet, rhythmic, peaceful chorus of baby breathing. Oh yes indeed, I recognized it as the perfidiously devious, nasty thing that it was - they were showing me, they wanted me to KNOW they could do it! Truly, as I layed there fuming at their wickedness, my mind was never clearer in my life.

Oh yes, it was clear to me; I saw it for what it was. My malevolent little monsters were not content with keeping me up all night, every night, every single night - night after night after night after night . . . ummm, where was I?

Oh, yeah, I was telling you about the night that I first saw what was really behind those eyes. I was telling you about seeing past that phoney innocent sweetness thing.

I was telling you how evil babies are.

My little guys got together and conspired to sleep thru the night. It was their plan - they deliberately denied me my illusion that they were innocent. They showed me it was all on purpose, they let me know they are evil, they wanted me to see that they hated me, and see how they conspired against me. In their wicked little way, they wanted me to know that - that's why they gave me just one night's sleep!!

Oh yes, friends and neighbors, it was clear to me - they weren't the only clever ones in this house. Those little baby noises they made, those quiet little sounds they thought I didn't hear, suddenly had meaning to me.

That quiet little "Babble, babble coo" became, "Psssssst, hey Dookie, you do him from midnite ta three, and I'll do him from three to six - Ryan's too tired to help tonight, he had him up all night last night."

Then a barely whispered, "Giggle babble coo," but I understood it. "Yeah Meggie, did you hear that scream of Ryan's . . . ha ha ha. Pops musta thought Jason was here with his knife -- Ryan, ya gotta warn us before you do that again!!"

It was war, guerilla war in the suburbs. I was under attack, I was being tortured - maliciously mentally murdered and nobody outside these walls knew what was going on within.

I was alone, it was them against me, it was goo-goo terrorism, a junior Jihad. It was a hideously evil, nightly ordeal and I knew it was never going to stop.

It was like aliens, or perhaps Elvis and the CIA, were beaming signals into my brain. All of a sudden, Edgar Allen Poe was making sense to me.

If this is making sense to you we need to talk.

All kidding aside, going without sleep can make you crazy. Lord knows, we have all been there, and we have all seen nights when reality started to get a little hazy, and it would have been unwise to choose anything Poe wrote as reading material.

I personally don't know why parents hurt their children. I don't know what twisted thing can afflict a parent's mind to the point that they hit them, or hurt them, or leave them abandoned. I don't know how it would feel to have evil seize your mind and make you hate your babies. I don't know and I don't want to know.

I do know that your thoughts and emotions, no matter how out of control they get are just that, and just yours. It isn't about how you feel, or how you felt. There is a limit, an edge at the brink of a precipice, and I believe that most of us have been there a time or two. There's no shame in that - we all get stressed.

It's all about what you do when you feel stressed beyond your limits, and things start getting away from you.

Call your mom, your dad, a friend, a relative, but call someone - anyone. If there is nobody else in your life you can call, get out the yellow pages, look under churches and call a Pastor; many publish their home phone numbers. You will find that any Pastor, or similar representative from any faith, who is worth a dime would want you to call at any hour, especially at that particular hour.

God Bless,

Bill E. Branscum & the Crew
Jeremy, Dook, Ryan & Megan