Nothing like the night's immense dark blanket helps me see things crystal clear. Like a bolt of lightning, details in their clarity, flash for a second when my senses feast on what they can partake of the vision. Then I no longer feel as if I am in a void, because I have understood what I had not before, and even often stunned with the impact such revelations bring.

Oprah calls these the “Aha!” moments, I think.                                   

I had an “Aha!” moment recently with my daughter. We all know that no mother intentionally hurts or does anything to damage her child – physically or psychologically. And motherhood does not come with easy-to-follow instructions. We emulate our own moms and temper their mothering styles with our silent “I'll never be like her,” pledges. Yet there are certain beliefs, fears or values, that may be so deeply buried within that when we promote the same on our own children, we forget those self-made promises.

When I was a five-year old, my family lived in Hilversum, in a rented home. There was a porous rock sitting in the corner of the second floor balcony. My mother told me and my two sisters that the rock had been a little girl once upon a time who disobeyed her mother, and consequently God turned her into stone. That should be a reminder and an example of what could happen to little girls who did not listen to their mothers.

The story and the image remained with me for a long time, and I lived in trepidation wondering after what mischief I might find myself as a rock in some balcony corner. As a young girl, I promised myself not to cause such unfounded fears in my own children and to be straightforward with them. This did not negate writing letters to my daughter on behalf of Santa, leaving cookie crumbs and an empty milk glass near the fireplace on Christmas Eve, or sneaking a quarter under her pillow every time she lost a baby tooth.

Those make up warm, fuzzy, precious childhood memories.

Last night, as we were reminiscing by the fireplace, my daughter - now in her twenties- confessed how she used to be terrified by something I used to tell her when she was about seven years old: The story of “Never Never Sleep Land”.

She has always been a sleepless child. Her pediatrician had told us that we had to accept it. “Some babies are non-sleepers. She is very alert and bright and she gets the sleeps she needs,” he had said. I remember feeling tired and frustrated myself, trying to get her to sleep and hearing her sing or talk to her younger brother through the walls of their rooms at night. She had a hard time getting up in the mornings, though.

I had made up a story to get them to sleep. I told my son and daughter that if they stayed awake and kept talking past their bed time, they would be detected by the witches on the prowl, rounded up with other sleepless children, and taken away to Never Never Sleep Land where they'd walk round and round and round, sleepless for days and nights.  

 My story did not get my daughter to sleep. She told me last night that instead, she lay in her bed, eyes shut tight, pretending, and wondering if those witches could tell the difference between those really asleep and those who merely had their eyes closed and kept quiet. She said she lived her tender young years in fear of spending the rest of her life walking round and round circling a bonfire, surrounded by a motley crew of sleepless young delinquents, supervised by the witches of Never Never Sleep Land. She said she wondered what it would be like not to lie down, to close her eyes, or to sleep ever again. She said she was traumatized for years with the images my silly story evoked in her young, impressionable mind.   

As I listened to her, I felt the pricks of the witches' spears, saw the big fire under their bubbling cauldron, and heard their nasty cackle echo through Time. I couldn't help remembering my own apprehensions, kneeling before that stone on the balcony in Hilversum, trying to figure out what part of it must have been the unfortunate girl's head or body. The chills and the fear of living the rest of my life as a stone, exposed to the elements, returned to me in my daughter's accusatory voice.

That was my “Aha!” moment. No matter how I had tried not to be like my mother, I had acted just like her, perpetuating ridiculous myths just to create a break for myself in the relentless flow of my life's responsibilities. I felt ashamed, selfish, inconsiderate as I embraced my daughter. I said I was sorry for having caused her indelible childhood fears by spinning foolish yarns.

Fortunately she looks back at those memories with a certain humor now, and amazement at how an "otherwise sensible woman” like her mother could invent such tales, convincing her daughter in the existence of a Land of the Sleepless, where children are supposedly still spinning like dervishes.

“I'm not bothered by it anymore,” she said last night as we hugged. “I just think you're weird sometimes. But if- and that's a big IF- I ever have children of my own, I'll never tell them fibs.”

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © 2009 

Illustration Credits:

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