I do not deal well with exhaustion.
I feel demoralized, lazy, like I am squandering opportunities, watching the economy sweep the can-I-get-published? bus off the road and into the deep muck of a future in which Mike and I are — we know — crazy to imagine raising our children on freelancing and, even worse, journalism.
Mostly, though, exhaustion makes me crazy. Lying in bed in the middle of the night sobbing about my life gone wrong crazy.
Here’s the formula for a good dose of Losing Your Mind: start with a pregnancy that somehow doesn’t seem like an adequate excuse to, you know, feel tired sometimes. Add a toddler who, for reasons unknown, has suddenly shifted from champion sleep habits (for a 22-month-old) to a rash of 2 a.m. screams for parental affection. And, for good measure, toss in the fact that you never quite managed to get your act together to have storm windows installed last winter and are well on track for another several months wandering through the upstairs wrapped in a down duvet and avoiding blasts of arctic wind coming from the baby’s room.
That last bit requires some explanation. But, first, the background.
When Jake began yelling for me in the middle of Sunday night — Night One of our latest round of sleep struggles — I approached him with my usual strict and unsympathetic words. Phrases like, “It’s the middle of the night!” “Mommy’s tired!” and “Tell me what’s wrong!” produced little but a more stubborn gripping of the side rail on his crib and that heartbreaking attempt to glom onto me when I felt my job was to refuse such glomming lest it be seen as a reward for unacceptable behavior. My background in parenting, you must understand, stems from dog training, where such simple one-to-one ratios are generally accurate and effective.
Instead, I spent the next hour or two in my bed with a pillow wedged between me and my flailing and unhappy boy, waiting for him to fall asleep so I could plop him back in his crib and pray for him to sleep until 9. My prayers, incidentally, went unanswered.
Night Two, I pitted my own obstinance against his. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong,” I said sternly to his addled, sleepy face. “Use your words.”
He refused to speak, probably because he didn’t have many words in his half-asleep state.
Stubbornly, I refused to hold him. I sat on the floor in my tank top and underwear, certain I could wait him out.
“Does something hurt?” I asked periodically, more to keep myself awake than out of any sense that I would receive a meaningful answer. “Did something scare you?”
How, I still wonder, do I expect a 22-month-old to understand the concept of “nightmare”? I imagine him trying, with his impressive yet still limited vocabulary, to explain to me what exactly is wrong when it has vanished into the darkness of his familiar room. Can I blame him for giving up and instead seeking a warm, safe hug?
Yes, if it’s 2:00 in the morning and my son has won the battle of the wills, I certainly can.
After 20 minutes or so, I picked up him up by his armpits, holding him away from me as if he were one of the stinky diapers that had, these past few days, been causing a nasty rash that just might have been the culprit for this episode, and dumped him none too gently on the bed.
Not surprisingly, he wailed.
“Go To Sleep,” I commanded, turning my back on him.
Sadly, he tried. There is a certain distressing irony in the fact that my son’s strong desire to follow instructions is far more upsetting to me than if he were to ignore me and continue to try to scale the pillow barrier to burrow against me. Frankly, I’d rather lose the fight and have my son sleeping in my bed until he’s 16 years old than have to listen again to the whimper and frantic thumb-sucking that accompany the near-silence when I hiss at him to Go To Sleep.
And this sorrow, perhaps — this desire to fix the problem so I can sleep through the night and no longer feel exhausted and not take my exhaustion out on a not-yet-two-year-old who is probably awakening because of dreams of his mother abandoning him and is met upon his screams of sadness with further, real-life abandonment — is what led me down a deep, dark, crazy, I-want-my-old-single-life-when-my-biggest-responsibility-was-my-dog-back tunnel of depression.
You know just what I’m talking about, don’t you?
Continue reading ‘Zzzzz, or Do I Wake Myself Up or Honor My Exhaustion?’
