Continued from Sleep Deprivation, Part 1...

Who needs sleep? Well you're never gonna get it. Who needs sleep? Tell me what's that for. Who needs sleep? Be happy with what you're getting. There's a guy who's been awake since the second world war.
~The Barenaked Ladies

For the past five years, Sleep and I have had a relationship as fitful as a high school romance: one night we vow we'll be together "4ever," then the next night we swear we'll never see each other again, only to get back together then find ourselves apart a few nights later.

After my son was a year old and his sleep started to settle down, and Mark (unbeknownst to even himself yet) hit bottom and slowed his acting out, I imagined Sleep and I had things worked out at last. But before my son's second birthday, I was unexpectedly pregnant with my daughter, and a few months before she was born, Mark admitted (to me and to himself) that he was a sex addict. After our son was asleep, I would keep Mark up talking late into the night, peppering him with questions that had no answers: questions like "Why would you do that?" and "What were you thinking?" Mark would beg me to let Sleep come back to us both, but I wanted nothing to do with it. I couldn't sleep or eat or breathe or live until I had squeezed out everything I need to know -- or until I left, and he didn't want me to leave. So, we didn't sleep.

And each day I'd read "The Little Engine That Could" to my son with my eyes closed because I'd memorized it, and I'd always feel I was speaking my own thoughts when I read the words of the Rusty Old Engine, "I am so tired. I must rest my weary wheels. I cannot pull even so little a train as yours over the mountain. I can not! I can not! I can not!"

Then my daughter was born and one or the other of the kids has been up at some point almost every night since.

A few nights ago, my son came into our room. He had soaked through his pullup and refused to put a new one on. So, Mark and I struggled with him and told him The Rules, one of which is "Thou shalt not go to bed pullup-less, lest the wetting of the bed make more work for Mama." Eventually we got the pullup on, with much screaming, but it woke his sister, who couldn't get back to sleep for over an hour. When I finally fell asleep again, it was an hour before my alarm was set to go off. I woke up an hour later and got the kids up, tired and cranky. I got my son ready for school and onto his little yellow bus. I stood outside smiling and waving good-bye, just like every day. And just like every day, he stared out the window, maybe at me or maybe at the house or the car or the road, and he didn't wave back or smile.

One morning, when my son was tired and cranky, we talked about how not getting enough rest makes us cranky. I told him that I was often cranky in the morning, because I like to be awake at night and that makes it hard for me to wake up early, just like he and his sister sometimes like to stay awake too late, which makes them cranky the next day. The next morning he woke up and said right away, in a way that sounded really curious about how I was feeling, "Did you get some good sleep, Mama? Or are you feeling cranky today?" Which made me smile, and I told him, "Not cranky at all, Buddy."

Ah, who needs Sleep anyway...