Sleep: A Lament, With Emo Clown

Sleep. I miss you, sleep. I miss sleeping when I’m sleepy, waking when I’m rested, rolling over and having just a few more minutes turn into half an hour.

I miss naps. I miss feeling like I might need a nap, taking off my clothes and getting into bed and having one, without forcing myself away from six other things that need doing.

I miss waking up from naps and having 15 minutes to recalibrate, make some tea and sit quietly. I miss reading novels in bed in the afternoon.

Plug in the kettle. Mourn it. Move on.

When I was a child I slept well and didn’t appreciate it at all. My mother claims I was a champion sleeper, gold medal winner. I went to bed and stayed in bed and got up at a reasonable hour.

When I was a teenager, I slept more. I guess. I would light candles and listen to Led Zeppelin in my room but I think I was still asleep before 11 pm most nights.

When I was a young adult, I slept less than you might think humanly possible. I was that person sleeping on your shoulder on the bus. I could get by on four hours a night and six cups of coffee the next day would make me competent enough to make change for you and sell you an awesome cheese I had never even tasted.

There were a few years, I call them the Why Did I Not Die? years, when I would stay up late and then sleep in and then have a nap, all in the same day.

Then I became a parent.

Reset.

I didn’t really lose too much sleep when I was pregnant with Trombone. With a first pregnancy, you go to bed and pass out when you want, assuming you’re not at work. Or sometimes if you are at work, you just get under the desk. If anyone asks: it’s an earthquake drill.

Then he was born and it was an earthquake all right. Existing with a newborn is like walking in a foggy, grey zombie forest where the trees have faces and the phone rings but it’s coming from miles away and there is crying and sweat and no schedule, none at all. Just get through the forest. The trees will not hurt you.

Trombone was a champion sleeper. Gold medal winner. We logged quite a few months of full nights of sleep and then I went back to work. Getting up at 5:30 AM to get to daycare and then to work totally obliterated all the sleep I’d stocked up on in the months before. Guess what? There is no sleep bank.

And whaddaya know, working full time, toddler in tow, while growing a baby brother, is really exhausting.

And then there are two.

Already, at the young age of 36, I see signs that sleep and I will never again be as close as we once were. I don’t sleep as soundly as I once did. I have had bouts of insomnia since becoming a parent that I never had before. I can’t sleep on my left side for some reason. More often than not, if anything touches me while I am sleeping, I wake up. If I stray from my asleep-before-10 routine more than two nights in a row, my entire existence takes on this flat pallor and I regret every choice I have ever made. One good night’s sleep and I am restored. I hug strangers. I am lark-like in my cheeriness.

I know how this goes. I’ll have a few years now of broken sleep; nightmares and bed wetting, then years of teenage children causing me to wait up trying not to read their myspacebook profiles while they’re out hacking Chinese mafia networks and by the time they’re solid, upstanding taxpayers, I’ll be too old to sleep.

Your life will never be the same. This is what they mean.

Having children makes emo clowns of us all.