Why is it that the more sleep I require and the more desperately I require it, the less of it I can get? My kids sleep through the night now. Finally. Six plus years into this mommy gig, I no longer wake to the eardrum-popping cry of a dirty diaper or the pools of milk soaked through the sheets beneath my overflowing knockers. Rubber sheets - those days are officially behind me.
And now with Dave home, the possibility of an afternoon nap so easily and often looms before me. All I have to do is ask and he insists I catch up on my sleep. A beacon of unconscious bliss. Alone time.
Nope. Not for me. I can't even nap anymore, much less fall asleep when I'm exhausted.
Unless I knock myself out chemically or narcotically, I simply can. not. sleep. Too many nights I've gone to bed late - after 1AM, or if I'm being truly honest, 2AM - and still, I wake up with the kids before 8:00. Not because Dave won't let me sleep in, he'd love nothing more than to let me, but simply because my body is awake. I can't sleep past sunrise anymore.
The condition is exacerbated by any deadline of any kind. I had to get up twice this week before 6AM to attend a conference and in spite of going more than three nights without any kind of sleep that amounted to any kind of a shit, even the harmless, minuscule shit of a field mouse, I STILL wasn't exhausted enough to actually sleep. I looked at the clock every hour all night long. Or oftener.
On the first night, my brain decided to fill my midnight hours with words, random excerpts from whatever novel I was reading. And as if that weren't bad enough, my brain somehow thought my sleeping hours would be best put to use trying to figure out the ending of the book, several potential endings in fact, naturally attempting to mimic the prose of the novelist, critiquing and changing each sentence as it occurred in my mind. Apparently, while I'm asleep, my brain thinks itself an author. Of course I can't remember a single word come morning. I'm too brain dead from lack of sleep.
The next night, the night I was surely so driven to exhaustion that there was no possible way my brain could prevent my sleep, my body decided to interfere and I tossed and turned all night. It wasn't quiet enough. My hips hurt. The arches of my feet ached. Genoa cried at 3Am, mere seconds after I'd first found myself unconscious. The hair on my temple was itchy. My toes cramped.
What gives?
I'm not looking for advice (not any more than you're looking for advice on how to cure your morning sickness), only empathy. I've tried everything: cutting off caffeine, exercise, not drinking booze, routines, hot tea, you name it. None of it truly helps, at least not consistently.
I think we've somehow screwed ourselves with this version of modern life. It's entirely a first world problem. Maybe if I had to wash the family's laundry in a metal bucket, scraping our dirty underpants across a washboard until my knuckles were raw, maybe THEN, I'd be tired enough to sleep through the night at age 33. Maybe even the entire night, like a gift from heaven. Or the gods of Ambien.
I think the problem is this: lack of mental downtime. My brain is a bucket all day long. I fill it constantly, overflowing it mostly with words: reading, speaking, writing, listening, laughing. All day long. It never ends. Sleep is the only chance my brain gets to empty the bucket. And the emptying is loud, disruptive, splashy.
And then, finally, just when I think I can't take another night of it, I suddenly wake up to the screech of the alarm clock. After a full night. Bliss. And then I have nothing to complain about and what good is that?
