They come at night.

We're unconscious, as insensible to our surroundings as if we'd been slipped a stupefying drug or deprived of quality sleep for the past six years.

They enter our bedroom, the aliens do, sometimes silently, sometimes throwing the door open and jumping into the bed as if escaping the path of an oncoming train.

"Mom!" they might yell. "I had a scary dream!"

Other times they're cold or thirsty or have a cough.

We motion them into bed, pull the covers up and listen to their hastily recounted nightmares — the guy with no face, the clown on wheels, the witch — and try to get them back to sleep.

Invariably groggy, we fail to recognize that this is the key moment, the time when we will decide whether to trudge across the cold floor and lose a little sleep getting them back into their own beds or give up the fight in service of warm feet and staying horizontal.

There are two in the conversation: Nighttime Parent and Daytime Parent.

"Come on," Daytime Parent says to Nighttime Parent. "Just take them back to their own bed and sit there with them for a couple of minutes while they fall back asleep."

Nighttime Parent's response:

"Go pound sand."

And so, we sleep — or try to, more accurately. One of the kids quickly works himself perfectly horizontal, pushing against the nearest back with his feet as forcefully as if he were trying to launch himself into space. Parents cling to the bed's cliff, holding on to a wafer-thin scrap of mattress.

Then, in comes the second bed-snatcher to complete the invasion. You're powerless, frozen in their tractor beams.

You can't very well reject one kid when the other is snoozing blissfully between his parents like a prudish dance chaperone who won't let the couple get too close.

Before you know it, there are four in the bed.

Someone always has an unfair amount of acreage and it's never an adult.

It's possible, sometimes, to relocate one or both bed-snatchers back to their own room, but it must be done carefully, quietly, with the same delicacy one reserves for defusing a bomb.

First, you must inch your arms under the shoulders and knees of the child, bending over in a way that is certain to remind you in the morning of your advancing age and imminent death.

Then, you stand, your knees straightening with a horrible creak. This might wake one or both of the bed-snatchers, leading to wailing and forcing a complete reset of the process.

Even if it works, when you get to their room, you must maneuver them into a freezing-cold bed and pull up freezing-cold covers over a body that had, until just moments earlier, been warmed by a parental comforter.

Should you defy the odds and succeed, now you have to do it all over again with the other one.

This is, also, no guarantee that they'll stay put. Just as often, they'll re-colonize your bed the second you fall back asleep, and there's no way you're moving them twice in one night.

Take us to your leader, one of the aliens might say.

The only problem is, they're the leaders — at least when you're too tired to fight.

It's a shame, really, but the sooner you come to terms with your fate, the easier your life will be.

Accept it. Don't struggle.

As the Borg say, resistance is futile.

In any case, one day, the bed-snatching will end. You'll have your space to yourself, then, every night, forever and always.

And that's when you'll really have something to cry about.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Photo credit: congerdesign at Pixabay