A couple of months ago my daughter started reporting the presence of people in her bedroom at night.  She referred to them mostly as pictures, but was insistent that she sees a ghost, and most importantly a witch.  She is afraid.  She expels genuine tears, which are prompted by the knowledge that once I leave the room her visitors will appear to her.  At a loss I probed her with questions such as “where do you see them”, “have you seen them before on TV or in a book” and “are you talking about dreams while you are sleeping?”

She is insistent that she has never seen them before (still, my immediate response is to curse myself for letting her watch that damn Snow White), and she is certain she is awake.  Despite one questionable experience I have had in my home thus far, I am inclined to shy away from suggestion of paranormal activity, and choose instead to dive a little deeper into the mind and eyes of my four year old child. 

While there are specific areas of the room where the ghost and witch appear, she has also reported the presence of faces in her headboard.  This is where it became all too clear for me.  As I ran my fingers over the wood, trying to find the patterns, I had a flash of memory.

Lying in my bedroom in my childhood home, I was crying and pleading with my mother to make the faces go away.  “Look at the faces, they are right there!” I called out from my little twin bed.  I watched my mother run her fingers along the new paneling, trying in earnest to see what she could not.  In the end, my father had to paint the paneling a lovely shade of blue.  I’m not sure if I ever told them, but even with the paint I could still see the faces.  They were, however, less pronounced and I was able to sleep at night without feeling watched.

I saw no pattern in my daughter’s my headboard, but I do not doubt that for her the faces exist.  So here we are in yet another phase of childhood development that I probably should have anticipated, but haven’t bothered to educate myself upon yet beyond memories of my own personal experience.  Thus far my encouragement has been to think happy thoughts, to not look at them, reassurance that they are not real, and to trust in that I am never far away.

I can’t help but wonder if the night light is the problem.  She is too afraid of the dark to go without one, but for this little imaginative child, I believe the shadows from the light are causing more harm than the darkness.  My next steps will involve lying with her before sleep, dissecting the room, giving names to the objects in the shadows, and attempting to bring what is real to the forefront while banishing away the fallacies the mind can create.

I would love to hear if you have experienced this problem with your children, and what were your methods to combat the nighttime fears of preschoolers?  As I reflect upon my task ahead, I am reminded of an old Suzanne Vega song:

I could shelter you

Keep you in light

But I can only teach you

Night vision

With my stomach in my throat and my heart plummeting I burst through the door and peer at the tub. She’s lying there unmoving several inches under water. Her soft curls are floating around her. She looks as peaceful as she did during the many hours of infancy when I watched her sleep.

Yet, she’s cold. Pale. Gone.

I stretch out my arms in a futile race to save my daughter, but before my finger tips can breach the surface of the water I awaken. Gasping for air, shaking, and covered in cold sweat, I find my wits enough to listen to the sounds around me. I can hear the calm, steady breathing of my children through the monitors keeping tabs on their bedrooms. I do my best to clear the horrific images that have crept up from the bowels of my subconscious, and lay there staring at my dark ceiling, waiting for sleep.

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This isn’t the norm for me. I don’t typically have dreams of my children’s demise at the hand of my own incompetency. I don’t ever imagine a time where I would “forget” that one of my children is taking a bath, and just go hang out somewhere else for a while.

But the subconscious mind is a tricky thing. For me, it created an unlikely event to represent a very real fear. As parents, especially of young ones, our days are filled with literally steering our children in the opposite direction of harm. Never could I have imagined while pregnant with my first child that the upcoming years would require such CONSTANT VIGILANCE. That’s exactly what it takes. It’s those split second moments that scare me. It could be a fraction of time when you’re not looking; a sleep deprived error; a new-parent bad decision. There is always a little something inside me that is asking, “Am I doing everything I could do, should do, to keep them safe?”

When my eldest was only a few months old my husband and I took her on our first short family trip out of the house to Babies R Us. It was a cold night and I had her bundled up in her infant seat in a warm jacket and blanket. She was sleeping, and so not to disturb her I pushed her around in her stroller, ogling all the cute baby girl clothing I wanted to buy.

After a while I took a break from my scouring of the racks to look down at my little girl, and saw that her lips had a blue tint to them. I screamed for my husband and we promptly removed her from her coverings and blanket. My husband picked her up and after several attempts to stir her, in what felt like minutes but was surely seconds, she awoke. Her color returned.

It was a stupid mistake. I was so concerned about keeping her warm, I had bundled her too tightly. I didn’t even think about that fact that once inside the store I should have removed her layers. We did not suffer consequences that day, but none the less it was a harsh lesson that had me questioning my capabilities. I was so embarrassed by my failure with our first attempt at emerging from our home with our child that I never told the story to a soul; until now.

I know any mother, and I’m sure fathers too, must have moments when they allow their darkest and deepest fears to creep to the forefront. If you’re like me you allow them their flash of warning and then shake them away. I try to find balance by allowing the thoughts the respect of possibility, but then store them aside where they belong and move on with life. Still, with ever constant vigilance.