My Nightmare on Elm Street

At 3:30am, I’m woken from a deep sleep by an eerie sound.

“Uhhhhoooooooh. Ohhhhhhhhhoooh. Eeeeeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhh.”

It’s coming from the baby monitor. I look over at the screen to see Baby standing in her crib, moaning in an otherworldly voice that she never uses when she’s awake.

“Hmmmmmmmmmmaaaahhhhh.” “Eeeeeeeoohhhhhhh.”

I wait, bleary-eyed, hoping she’ll go back to sleep. No such luck.

“Ma ma!” “Ma ma!” “MA MA!”

Before these late-night wake-up calls, I had always pictured myself as the loving mother in a flowing robe who rushes at the first cry of her child to lovingly comfort her and chase the bad dreams away.

But the real me is a little creeped out by the whole thing.

By day, Baby’s room is a cozy, happy place with lots of books and cuddly stuffed animals. By night, it’s an obstacle course of sharp-edged toys and beady-eyed, supposedly inanimate creatures staring at me from dark corners.

Once inside, I turn on a nightlight. It’s not for Baby. It’s for me.

She’s still standing in her crib, hair in her face, staring straight ahead and making those freaky noises.

“Eeeeeeeuuuuhhh. Ohhhhhhhhhgooooooo.”

In this zombie-like state, she’d be a perfect candidate for a horror movie. Gingerly, I reach under her arms and lay her back down. She stops moaning and stares up at me. I pull an ottoman up beside the crib and hum softly for a few minutes until she closes her eyes. After another minute, I stand.

“Ma MA!” Her head pops up. She’s looking at me. I sit back down.

“Shhhhh,” I say. Her head drops back to the pillow. I can’t see her on the other side of the bumper.

I wait. The silence grows. The shadows loom. If she pops her head back up, I think, it will scare the hell out of me. I tense, waiting for it. Waiting for it. Waiting for…

Pop!

“Aaagh!” I yelp.

“Ma Ma!”

This is so not working.

“Shhhhh,” I say. She puts her head down, obediently closes her eyes.

I feel guilty. What kind of crappy mom is afraid of her own daughter? Will she sense my late-night fear of her and end up becoming a person who deserves to be feared?

After all, I suppose even Freddy and Jason and Michael Myers were once little Freddy and little Jason and little Mikey. Perhaps they were normal boys– until their moms started jumping and shrieking whenever they’d appear at their bedsides in the wee hours of the morning.

“Hmmm,” I’m sure little Freddy thought to himself. “I’ll bet if I wear knives on my fingers, she’ll scream even louder.”

“Boy, my hockey mask really brought the house down last night!” thought little Jason. “Maybe I should try out my act this summer at camp!”

Is this the road my own little daughter is headed down?

She did keep insisting on wearing my underwear on her head yesterday. Will this be her panic-inducing disguise of choice? Who’s to say?

Whatever her neurosis, it’s sure to be all my fault. I will have single handedly turned an adorable baby girl into an underwear-headed toddler of terror, striking fear in the hearts of all denizens of suburbia.

Or so I imagine as I doze chin in hand on the ottoman. I wake with a jolt, only to find that she is, at last, asleep.

I look at her in her crib. Eyes closed, she is a cherub, a sweetly sleeping delight. What was I thinking? I leave her room, softly closing the door, and head back to bed.

That’s where Hubs lays asleep, rhythmically making the sound of the undead. Clearly, he was kidnapped by aliens while I was gone and replaced with a decoy. There is no way a human could snore like that.

I lie in bed, deeply troubled, tentatively looking at him every now and then and at the shadows that surround me. Aliens. Here. I watched “The X-Files.” I want to believe. Unless it’s 4am. Then I don’t. I just want to go back to sleep. But that won’t happen any time soon.

This is the real reason I no longer get any sleep. And it’s too horror-bly embarrassing to talk about.