There will be no songs
Sometimes you are the reason your child is crying herself to sleep with loud and desperate sobbing. Sometimes instead of being the one to comfort and sooth her you give her 5 minutes to wail before ordering her to be quiet now so her siblings can fall asleep. Then you hear the quieter muffled sounds of the sister sharing her bed crying too. You sit in the other room, listening to every sound of grief, and woe, and you do not take it lightly, but you won't go in again. Instead you find a tangled string from a kite lying about and you start in the middle, trying to work your way out, to make sense of the knots and put it right again. So tired of coming into sing at bedtime, only to find the room torn apart and clothes still on the floor you told them, tonight after dinner, "If I come in to sing and your room isn't ready for sleeping, with everything put away and the floor picked up, we'll spend the singing time cleaning up instead and then you will go to bed without