The no-sleep-syndrome visits parents twice in the course of their child’s upbringing. The first of course is the baby who keeps you up all night. Then you sleep for years. During late teenage years the syndrome returns and again affects mothers primarily. Sleepless nights plague the parent as the child needs the bottle again. Not milk but liquor, beer. The teenager is partying, not screaming from his crib. He will fall down like a toddler and speak incoherently like a baby. He will get sick like a baby too. His playpen has changed to the bar. At least in NYC where the bars cater to the teenager – nearing, not quite yet 21. In the morning we tiptoe around his room not to wake him – as we did when he was an infant. Of course now not even a cannon firing would jar him. I guess the teenager wants to return to infancy again – a last gasp before achieving adulthood.

Mylklklk is at Harvard. He went around the world last year and I slept. Who knows what he was doing, but I slept. Now that he has returned to the Big Apple for vacations and he is out, I don’t sleep. My radar only works when he is near me.

We leave a light on for him and I try to fool myself he is home by stuffing towels under my door so I don’t see the light. We have gotten – and I have made – calls at 4:30 a.m. because we are leaving for a plane and no teenager. He makes it, as do his friends whose parents are calling to find their errant child before their plane departs.

My friend, feeling especially haggard after a 5:30 a.m. "child return," suggested we book a room in a hotel to get some sleep. Her only fear was the tourists would have them all. Her husband agreed it would probably be impossible to get a reservation, but not because of tourists; it would be filled with mothers of teenagers. These mothers will fill the Pierre, the Plaza, the Regency each college vacation with a group rate. They will willingly fork over $500 a night to sleep, sleep, sleep.

The only revenge for this is to know our teenagers will go through this with their children and look back and remember.

By Tina