"Please don't wake me, no don't shake me, leave me where I am, I'm only sleeping..."
~The Beatles
Sleep and I used to have such a good relationship. Seven years ago, we used to spend long, uninterrupted stretches of time together. We used to, well, sleep together every night -- naked! Sleep used to wrap itself around me at night and linger with me long after the dawn; it wasn't going to tear itself away and I wasn't going to push it. How happy and in love we were! But Sleep and I have had our problems in recent years. I know we'll work them out eventually, but for now, I'm, well, tired.
The very evening I got pregnant with my son, I kid you not, I stopped sleeping through the night. For nine long months of pregnancy, the bathroom called me away from sweet, sweet Sleep, tearing me away from the warmth next to me out to the cold, cold porcelain. Then my son arrived and oh man, it felt like he never, ever slept! The first pediatrician we saw (of about five, before we found the fabulous Dr. Diego) warned of doom and death if we coslept, and in my weepy, anxious (yes, in retrospect PPD) post-partum state, I clung to my efforts to use the crib.
I'd nurse my son, put him down, listen to him scream like demons were torturing him, pick him up, nurse him back to sleep, put him down again... All night long. We never slept, well, ok, he slept a little. Until one night, I put him down and as he started wailing I picked him up, wanting to throw him at a wall, and whispered viciously, "You are a BAD baby!" The moment after I said it, and even to this day, I am racked with guilt and despair when I think of that moment; I want to never have lived that or thought that or said that. He was not bad, he was in pain, and so was I. From that night on, he slept ("dangerously") in bed with me, and while my relationship with Sleep improved from nothing to something, it was still bad. I slept without covers or pillows for fear of smothering him, and I slept very lightly, conscious of my baby boy's every movement.
Eventually, around 9 months old, I night weaned my son (with much more screaming on his part) and moved him out of our room. I began to get to know Sleep again. Still, it wasn't that easy romance of our earlier years together. I was waking up with anxiety attacks, and my husband, who used to be warm next to me through the night, wasn't always there anymore. His relationship with Sleep wasn't the same either; the stress our son's birth and care brought were pushing him to act out more and more. I thought I was worrying over nothing; it was my hormones or my troubles in my relationship with Sleep. Or maybe he just didn't want to be near the unattractiveness of my post-partum body, with its soft floppy belly and leaky breasts.
He'd stay up late on the computer (as I later found out, not working but acting out with pornographic photos and e-mail and video chats), and he'd wake up early and rush to work. He'd mumble in his sleep and he'd curse to himself distractedly in the bathroom in the morning. And I pushed Sleep away each morning, straining to hear, asking him if everything was ok and what he was talking to himself about; the answer was always that he was stressed about work. It was more than a year before I know the the real answer: he was beating himself up for whatever shameful thing he'd done the day before, vowing that today would be different, and it never was...
We were both living in troubled dreams, longing for Sleep...
