Forget diamonds, chocolate, or flowers. What I really want for Mother’s Day this year is a child-free bed.

Last night, the night before, and the night before that, I woke up to find not one, not two, but three children in my bed. It probably would have been four if not for that blessed crib.

All the children were sleeping near the top of the bed, so I took a pillow and lay down horizontally across the bottom of it. With the exception of my husband’s legs, there was no other human being to bump into down there. I fell back asleep instantly.

An hour later I woke to find that I was again surrounded by children. One had actually wrapped her arms around mine. So I dragged myself out of bed, marched into another bedroom, and sank down into a child’s cool twin bed. I finally had a couple of hours of peaceful sleep there.

I am not the only parent playing musical beds.

“We have a kid in our bed almost every night,” a mother of three said. “I wake up every morning surrounded by children and my husband has slept somewhere else. In an ideal world, I’d have two California king mattresses lined up next to each other.”

On most parenting subjects, the moms and dads I speak with are primarily concerned with how a particular issue impacts their children. But when I asked parents how they felt about having children sleep in their beds, not a single parent mentioned concerns for the children.

“I can’t sleep. The kids sleep horizontally. They kick and thrash,” a mother of two boys said. “No one told me that the sweet-smelling baby and the cuddly toddler grow up to be the stringy 9-year-old with bad breath. That’s what I have in my bed on occasion, and I’m sick of it.”

“When we first had a baby, I used to think the parents who didn’t let the kids come crawling into their beds in the middle of the night were those authoritarian freaks,” one father told me. “‘When the clock says ‘seven zero zero’ you can come into our bed,’ one such mother told me she said to her children. I thought she was crazy. Now I see that she was just smarter than we were.”

And of course, there are other things people want to do in the matrimonial bed.

“We call our 4-year-old our condom,” a father of four said. “Any time we are about to have sex, I don’t know how she senses it, but she marches into our bedroom.”

Another mother of three said one of her sons has the same unusual ability. “The second my husband puts his arms around me, it’s like he has some sixth sense. He storms into the room and jumps in between us. Now that can really kill the mood.”

One mother said she valiantly returns her children to their bedroom each night. “I just march them right back to bed. They know they can’t come in.”

Another set of parents has solved their problem by making a little nest for their 8-year-old son on the floor next to their bed. “We told him he cannot come into our bed. But every night, without fail, we hear him come into our room and jump into the sleeping bag and pillow we’ve left for him. It’s better than him in our bed, but we’d prefer him in his room,” the mother said.

There is research to support arguments for and against a family bed. Some medical and parenting experts, such as William Sears and James McKenna, say that there are benefits to parents sharing their bed with children and that this practice is perfectly safe. This camp insists that everyone sleeps better this way and that infants and children have slept with their parents for millions of years.

Several other experts, such as T. Berry Brazelton, point to the dangers of co-sleeping. A University of Michigan study found that the rate of sudden infant death syndrome is 20 times higher for babies sleeping in an adult bed compared to a crib. This camp points out that children who sleep in their parent’s bed are more likely to resist going to bed and awaken more often during the night. They also say that the longer a child is allowed to sleep in his parents’ bed, the harder the habit will be to break when the situation is no longer comfortable.

Still, some parents of older children wax nostalgically about the days when their gang was dying for a family bed. “Stop complaining and enjoy it. In a flash you’ll be wishing you could get them to cuddle up in your bed,” a mother of two teenagers said.

I’m sure she’s right. But right now all I can think about is how to get them out.

sarasberman@aol.com