I’m not even going to joke about the gods any more. They clearly regard my ambitions to master sleep as akin to donning wings and taking aim at the sun, and every time I speak out loud about those ambitions they smite me. Pride, apparently, really does goeth before a fall, and seeing as the falls that I’m having don’t actually result in anyone losing consciousness, the divine smackdowns for prideful reporting of sleep victories are getting kind of frustrating.
The boy is sleeping in his own bed. The boy is sleeping in his own bed. THE BOY. IS SLEEPING. IN HIS OWN BED.
And I’m not even afraid of incurring the wrath of the sleep gods by saying so. Well, mostly not. I may need to sacrifice some stuffed barnyard creature as a precautionary measure, and I am certainly going to be knocking any all things wood-derived and I’m going to keep the victorious fist-pumps to a minimum until we’ve got this sleep thing conquered, but - let’s all keep our voices down here – I’m pretty sure that we can conquer it, the wrath of the gods notwithstanding.
I knew that the gods smite for lesser things than overt celebrations of toddlers sleeping through the night. I knew this, and yet I celebrated. And sure enough, the gods, they smote, and Jasper woke and woke and woke again and ended up, once more, attached to my head in the dark hours before the dawn with two hair-clutching fists.
Still. We’ve had one night. There could be more. There will be more.
Next time, though, I’ll have to tell you all in code. And you will all congratulate me in code, and the gods, they will be none the wiser and we will all sleep happily ever after.
I hope. Because I’m really not up for sacrificing a goat. Not that I wouldn’t if I became deranged enough with lack of sleep, but still.
To Sleep, Perchance To Have Some Small Person Yank The Hairs Out Of Your Head
I have a confession to make: when I said that I was giving up on any kind of sleep training, I meant it, but I was also kind of hoping in, some small dark corner of my heart, that ‘giving up’ would be the magic bullet and that by ‘giving up’ I would be making space for the possibility that the whole situation would just fix itself, you know, because doesn’t it sometimes work that way? Well, it hasn’t, so far, although it’s only been one night – a long, difficult night during which the boy yanked about 263 strands of hair out of my head, one by one (counting oneself to sleep by hairs instead of by sheep: over-rated) – and I have to remind myself to be patient, to let it go, to try to stop worrying and love the wee hands gripping my head, really, because I do remain committed to this idea that this – this whole thing – is a thing that I will someday miss and someday mourn the passing of and someday want back, badly and that I should just give myself over to that, in whole or in part, or something.
This is me reminding myself. This is me reminding myself. This is… zzzz…
I give up. I surrender. The battle has been fought. It has been lost.
We have tried everything, pretty much, to get Jasper to stay asleep in his own bed. Which is to say, we have tried everything within the limits of our physical and emotional endurance. We made a final push this weekend, a cry-it-out effort to hold the pass of our bedroom door and defend the peace of our bed, but to no avail. The boy found his way around our defenses and, like Leonidas at Thermopylae, we held our ground, we tried to hold our ground, but our forces were no match for his cries and his pleas and his Dadda Dadda Dadda Dadda MAMA MAMA MUM! And so we fell, and so we give up.
Things are getting desperate around here. Like, really.
I can’t remember the last time I slept more than two or three hours at a stretch. I had hoped that my brief trip to Chicago would provide a full night’s sleep, but, alas, I spent that night waking up every hour wondering why I wasn’t being woken up every hour. Which, you know: FRUSTRATING.
The source of the problem is this: wakeful little Jasper and his grabby little hands. The boy has been in some kind of continuous developmental spurt/growth spurt/teething bender/WHATEVER since early September and the only thing that calms him down when he wakes – as he inevitably does, every night – is a fistful of my hair, preferably clutched while his little body – conveniently relocated to the master bed – is wrapped tightly around my head. Removal of legs or arms or fists results in high pitched wailing.
The gods, they were listening, and they did not approve. That, or you all weren’t making the necessary sacrifices on my behalf. Which I understand, sort of, because good sheets (the sleep gods’ preferred object of sacrifice) are a thing to treasure, but still. We’re talking about sleep here, the loss of which is all the more painful after you’ve luxuriated in its sweet embrace for a couple of days (and after you’ve tossed your supply of Ativan, in premature celebration of your reunion with Morpheus and Hypnos who, it turns out, were just in it for a two-night stand, the bastards.)
I am now going into mourning, and, also, am rummaging through the trash to find that bottle of Ativan.
As you were.
Posted by Her Bad Mother on March 1, 2009 3:25 pm • sleep, the gods • Comments are
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And On The Seven-Hundredth Day, She Rested
Sleep has come to our household.
Sleep has come to our household.
I’m reluctant to say too much about it, or even to explain it (let’s just say that a combination of doctorly advice and husbandly heroism and sheer desperation and luck and blessedness probably have much to do with it.) I am terrified that if I even say the words aloud – sleep, glorious sleep, how I have missed you! – the gods will be quick to smite me for my arrogance and ingratitude. So I am reserving any commentary on this issue until I am reasonably certain that the gods are no longer paying attention, or until I have banked enough sleep that it doesn’t matter if they take it away from me again.
Because, sleep. Is precious. I want to hold it close and never let it go. So, don’t ask me how I accomplished this, what deity I prayed to, what divine strings I had to pull. Also, consider making sacrifices on my behalf. I hear that burnt offerings of 700-thread count Egyptian cotton bedsheets are particularly effective with the lesser Olympian gods.
Not shown: lesser Olympian gods.
In the meantime… my body has become convinced that it is going into hibernation (understandable, really: why else would it suddenly, after nearly a year of never sleeping more than two to three hours at a stretch, find itself curled up in a den of quilts, laying completely, uninterruptedly still for almost seven hours? Two nights in a row? I would make the same mistake) and I find myself wandering around in a sponge-brained, stumble-clutz zombie state, fighting off sleepiness at every moment of the day. Is this normal? Does this pass? And more importantly: is there a cure for this, other than actually, you know, hibernating, which is not option because 24 hours/day minus 7 hours sleeping = 17 hours, during which I’m still on duty. Are multiple shots of expresso my only recourse, or does someone out there have a cure for sleep-induced narcolepsy?
(Listen to me, asking for remedies to ward off sleep. I must be dreaming.)
