Craving//Connecting: Sleep

Photo by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash

If you’ve ever experienced insomnia, you’ve also experienced its companion—isolation. Lying awake in the wee hours of the morning, craving respite, you feel like you’re the only one in the world whose mind is still awake. In the motionless, quiet moments when darkness surrounds you, fears—both rational and irrational—creep in. Or maybe your mind is finally settled, but your body (or someone else’s—ahem, looking at you, children), forbids you to rest. “Surely”, you think to yourself, “I’m the only one.” Let these stories serve as a reminder that you, indeed, are not. If you find yourself staring at the ceiling, playing the game of “if I fall asleep now, I’ll get _____ hours of sleep”, chances are, I’m doing the same.

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This exercise has made me wish I had pictures of every bedroom I’ve ever lived in to document exactly how it looked. I’m sure if I scoured the countless scrapbooks and photo boxes my mom has, I’d find one of my childhood bedroom, but this will suffice for our purposes. Peep the bed behind me, the one in the blue and white striped tea party dress.

I’m six years old, lying awake in my daybed, late at night. Visions of alligators crawling over the fence of my landlocked suburban North Texas home replay in my mind over and over, bringing with them a deep seeded terror, which will preclude me from falling asleep any time soon. I turn to face the wall and transport myself to music class, where the rails of my daybed become music notes and it is my job to teach the class their importance¹. I play school for as long as it takes for the positive images in my mind to overwhelm the scary ones and eventually allow me drift off to sleep.

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My sweet Meme who wears this expression 99.9% of the time you see her. Unless you’re a preteen summoning her in the wee hours of the morning. But in my defense, this picture only captures a FRACTION of the knick knacks and porcelain dolls this house contained, which became very scary in the dark.

I’m twelve years old, begging my mind to make sense of the noises I’m hearing in my grandparents’ living room. A creak here. A squeak there. Did that porcelain doll just blink? The presence of my cousins sprawled out on the pallet beside me does little to quell my fears—their soft snores only make me resentful of their peaceful, unconscious state. I call out for my Meme, as running to her room is riskier than staying put. My sweet, mild mannered grandmother pads down the stairs and huffs onto the worn leather couch, throwing pillows out of the way with more force than I knew she had in her.² “There’s nothing to be afraid of”, she lectures, as she settles into her makeshift bed. While I have never seen Meme irritated before, her presence alone is enough to settle me to sleep.

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While you can’t see our lofted beds in this picture, what you can see is the ancient tv we owned. Please note the DVD player AND VCR perched atop the television. You may also note how poorly decorated our room was. 2024 college girls would never.

I’m eighteen years old, perched in my lofted dorm bed. Across the room is my friend and roommate, Amy, who is well acquainted with my insomnia, which is why most nights she doesn’t complain about me falling asleep to our old remote-less tube TV³. But tonight, as I lay tossing and turning, she has long been asleep when the theme song from the Gossip Girl DVDs I rented from Blockbuster stir her. “Turn it off. NOW,”, she demands from her slumber. I amble down my ladder to oblige her wishes, but cannot fathom spending the rest of the night in silence—the alligators of my childhood have morphed into perseverating thoughts and existential questions that plague me in the still of the night. Comforting noise is the only way to keep them at bay and ensure I ever get rest. I plug my headphones into my computer, Google “free book read aloud”, and fall asleep to the first book I find, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, wafting through my ears.

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This picture was taken the morning before my first sleepless night with my precious baby girl. Or was it the morning after? As any mom of a newborn will tell you, those early days all blur together.

I’m thirty years old, holding my just-over-24-hours-old daughter in my arms in the hospital bed. I fumble for several minutes trying to work the Firestick we preemptively packed in order to queue up one of the “middle of the night shows” I had thoughtfully decided on, to no avail. I eventually resign myself to watching hours of Christina On The Coast while my baby cluster feeds until the sun begins to make her debut in the sky. Is it supposed to hurt this bad?, I think to myself, wincing in pain any time she latches, not yet knowing how severely tongue, lip, and buccal tied she is. Not yet knowing the relentless pounding in my head is a spinal headache from my epidural. It will be days before I figure out either; weeks before her ties are resolved.

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My recovery headquarters for the past few days, in all its glory. I will spare you a picture of myself strewn about in its midst. Please ignore all the items I am unable to pick up off the floor and please note how Nugget cushions make great couch extenders.

I’m thirty three years old, propped up on the couch recovering from my endometriosis excision. The pain medicine has subsided the ache in my incision sites, but the air the doctor injected into my belly during the procedure has traveled onwards and upwards, only to become trapped behind my shoulders. I putter to the kitchen to make a mug of peppermint tea. I turn up my heating pad as high as it will go. I apply more Biofreeze. I prop yet another pillow behind my head to keep me as upright as possible while still holding onto to the hope sleep will come and numb the pain. Around 4:00 am, my wish finally comes true.

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 This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Sleepless."

1. Sometimes I was Julie Andrews teaching the Von Trapp children do re mi fa so la ti do. I have no idea why the rails on my bed always reminded me of musical notes.

2. That night should have been my first clue that in just a few short years she would go on to set a powerlifting world record for her age group.

3. When I see dorm rooms these days, I laugh to myself picturing the space Amy and I shared. For some reason the tv I brought to college not only came without a remote, but required a VCR (a VCR!!!) with a tape inside in order for it to work. And as mentioned, this was before Blockbuster’s demise. Whenever I was feeling homesick or depressed or having boy troubles, I would scrounge up all my spare change and rent one disk of Gossip Girl at a time. Did I mention this was 2009?