So, I found out last week (much to my disappointment) that I am not the Ultimate Ruler of the Universe. In fact, I'm not even a competent Ultimate Ruler of Me. Maybe some of you knew that already. Actually, I knew that already, but I always forget. You see, I make these grand proclamations like "I am going to get enough sleep this week!" expecting the universe is just going to fall in line and let me do that and that I am going to be able to use my willpower to change deeply ingrained habits. And, go figure, everything and everybody does what they're going to do, which (oddly) doesn't include bending to my will.

Last week, I announced (to myself, my family and my little corner of the blogosphere) that I would be starting The Week of Sleep to kick of my Year of Health. I was going to be in bed by 10 p.m. each night, and I was going to get a solid eight hours of sleep a night for a change. And with all of that sleep, I was going to be able to eat better, exercise more and (as an added bonus not related to the Year of Health) keep my house neat and tidy like never before. And for a few nights, I was actually doing pretty well; I got that sleep and was feeling hopeful about the week to come.

Then my husband got sick. And my daughter got sick. And he was coughing all night. And she was unable to fall asleep because her head hurt and her tummy hurt and her eyes hurt and her jaw hurt and her nose hurt. And she was unable to stay asleep because her nose was runny and she was coughing and she needed water and she needed medicine and did she have a fever? no, but she was still too hot and then too cold and then just not comfortable. So I didn't get all that awesome sleep for several nights.

But then, when everyone started feeling better, I still didn't get the sleep I needed. Because at the end of it all, I just threw my hands up and said, "Fine! If that's the way it's going to be, if the universe is not going to collude in my quest for sleep, then I'm not going to either!" So, the past two nights, when I could well have gone to bed by, maybe not 10 p.m. but at least 10:30 p.m., I've been up until close to (or well after) midnight. As usual.

So, at what should have been the end of The Week of Sleep, I haven't slept. In fact, I. am. totally. exhausted. But even through my bleary, sleep deprived eyes, I can see that I neither accepted the things I could not change nor had the courage to change the things I can. It's time to start over this week with a new attitude, in which I'm not the big boss of the nighttime world, knowing I have an added reason to pray at bedtime.

I have a bazillion ("No," my son Austen, who is very proper about his numbers, would insist, "there's no such thing as a bazillion!"  Fine then, a gajillion?) things I want to get out of my head and onto this virtual paper, but I spent my writing time today sleeping. (Now you may ask how I'm writing this, and the answer is, "Do you really want to know?  Ok, my husband is feeding the kids while I pretend to be using the bathroom.  When you are a mom sometimes you have to type leaning over a laptop perched on the bathroom sink.")

So, lesson number one, five days into the Year of Health, is that I don't get enough sleep.  I knew that.  But what I didn't realize until yesterday was that nothing else (eating right, exercising, flossing my teeth, showering daily) is going to get done unless I get enough (or closer to enough) rest.  So after (once again) staying up too late last night, I took a nap today with the promise that I will. not. stay. up. tonight. writing!  You know, the way I usually do.  Napping is my sleep version of using one credit card to pay off another, while still remaining in debt overall.  (Not that I know anything about that kind of behavior with credit cards.  Nope.  Not at all.)

So, to kick start the Year of Health, I will be giving the Week of Sleep a try.  I'm just hoping I can do it without too much harm to my writing time.  I'm planning to let the dishes suffer instead!

I had planned to post this on Tuesday, but it turned out to be a completely crazy day, and of course, yesterday was my day of rest.

This week I focused on sleep (and fighting with God). The day started out badly. I accidentally ate sugar for breakfast on a day I'd committed not too. I was in a sleepy haze and just forgot. And it didn't get any better.

I didn't want to focus on sleep. I wanted to do a million other things, just like I always do. I wanted to exercise and meditate and clean the fish tank. But I was so very tired. Because I never get enough sleep; I always do those million other things instead. I stay up late because I'm so thankful to have the kids in bed, to have responsibilities done with, to have time for me. I don't want to miss out on all the fun I can finally have at the end of the day by sleeping! And it was the same this week. Like a willful little child (and I should know, I've got two of them) I screamed, "I do not want to go to bed!" at anyone who would listen: my husband, my body, God. I even cried about it. I was so disappointed in myself for wanting to "just" sleep.

But (after a lot of fussing about it) I did. I put everything else aside and got in bed and set the alarm clock for just before the kids got home from school. And I slept for almost five hours. Then I got up (crankily, annoyed at all that time I'd "wasted") ate a quick late lunch and met the kids. I continued to pout and be annoying all day until I made myself go to bed at 10 pm (which is extremely early for me).

And the next day, I felt better. And rewarded myself by staying up past midnight watching TV with my husband, thus starting the whole cycle all over again. Doh! Well, at least for one day, I got the rest I needed, and realized how much I do need it.

Did you do anything this week? Share in the comments or post a link to a blog post in Mister Linky below. And if you want to join in and change one aspect of your life for one day, click over to my introductory post to get more information and a badge.

Wow, December first already.  A side benefit of this "Just for Today Challenge" is that one day a week, I know what the date is.  But no, knowing what the date is was not my own challenge for this week.  This week, I was going to focus on moisturizing.  You might think, "Moisturizing?  Of all the things you could concentrate on for one day?  Really?  Using lotion?"  Yes, I really don't moisturize enough.  In fact, I have a condition called "contact dermatitis" or in layperson's terms "housewives' eczema."  It is caused by overexposure to...  (Drum roll, please.)  Soap and water.  (See, anything in excess can be harmful.)  My hands are dry and scaly and cracking (yes, they actually bleed) because I wash them (or dishes or counters or clothes) too often and moisturize not enough.

But I didn't actually end up moisturizing at all (surprised?) because I was too busy concentrating on something much more difficult: not watching TV.  Of all the things I do (or don't do) on my spiritual Wednesdays, I never thought that giving up TV would be one of the challenges.  I'm not anti-TV — I enjoy it — but I've gone years without owning a television and months on end without watching one, and have never really missed it.  Yet, last week, I really craved television.  I wanted to sit down and watch a crappy crime drama, something entertaining and relatively mindless, while the kids were at school.  It's a rare treat I give myself whenever I have an especially big pile of laundry to fold, and I was longing for that luxury.

Of course, I had to consider why it was I so desperately wanted to watch TV on that particular day last week, and I realized that I was tired.  I saw that I use the TV and the computer as a way of keeping myself from falling asleep while not overtaxing my brain with any of that difficult thinking stuff.  I wanted to watch TV because I didn't want to go to sleep, but I also couldn't handle do anything harder than digesting an episode of Cold Case.  So, instead of watching TV and folding laundry, I took a nap, which was just what my body needed.  But all that concentrating on not watching TV drove hand lotion right out of my tired brain.  Oh, well, maybe next week.

Did you do anything this week?  Share in the comments or post a link to a blog post in Mister Linky below.  And if you want to join in and change one aspect of your life for one day, click over to my introductory post to get more information and a badge.

I'm a party pooper.  I'm a downer.  I'm no fun.  I ruin other people's good times.  (Because I totally have control over other people's good times, you know.)

You see, yesterday Mark and I had plans to take the kids to a pumpkin patch.  We were going to let them run around and jump off hay bales and find pumpkins and navigate a kiddie corn maze.  But I woke up a few hours into my night's sleep when one wet child tried to climb in bed with me and an hour later when another child sniffling from the tail end of a cold woke up early and was ready to start the day.  And, as people who don't get enough sleep will be, I was cranky.  Bite your head off cranky.  Stab you in the eyeballs with a fork cranky.  Blast your eardrums straight out the top of your skull with my screams cranky.  That is, if I could open my bleary eyes long enough to find you.

I decided that I needed to go back to bed.  And that was a good decision.  But there was that whole pumpkin patch thing.  Now, the kids didn't know we were planning it, because I'm no fool or at least not so much of one as I used to be.  I know that my kids get so hyped up about exciting events that they can't sleep.  (Not that they slept anyway on this occasion.)  And then they become sorely disappointed (read: wail all day as if the world has ended) if someone gets sick or it rains or the car blows a tire and we can't go.  So I rarely tell them what we're up to until we're up to it.

I knew that they were none the wiser, but it still triggered that whole party pooper speech in my head.  That whole "I should work harder and do better" speech.  That whole "Why is it that everyone else in the world seems to be able to juggle jobs and sleep and housecleaning and taking their kids out to one freaking pumpkin patch once a year and I can't?!" speech.

I knew those speeches were coming from a place of exhaustion, but they were still pretty persuasive.  (You do have a point there, crazy voice in my head, I can be pretty sucky.)  But I went off to bed anyway.  And hours later, when I woke up, all the crazy talk was gone.  I took my son out to a park while my daughter went to a friend's house to play and Mark took a nap of his own, and suddenly I felt like the most together Mama ever.  Amazing what a little sleep will do to turn the party pooper into the life of of her own party.

There is a parable in the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People about a person who works harder and harder to saw down a tree because of a perception that there is no time to stop, take a break and sharpen the saw. I have never been a big saw sharpener. I like to push and push and say, "Just this one more thing and then I can take a break. I'll stop when this is finished. It would be selfish of me to stop when other people aren't." And because I'm a perfectionist, I have rarely been able to get that one more thing to a state where it is finished enough to satisfy me, so I hack away endlessly at that tree with an old toothless saw.

This summer, my kids been staying up later, enjoying the long summer days, and I have been getting less by extension. We've had more visitors, as people travel in the summer and between the kids and the guests, I haven't had much time for solitude, something I deeply need to sharpen my own mental and spiritual saw. I've been striking a better balance than in years past, by prioritizing and cutting back on activities (like blogging), but as the summer draws to a close I've still be exhausted and cranky in a way that I'm not during the school year, when I can count on a little time each day where I can at least use the bathroom without anyone needing me. And, unlike in times past, I could recognize the wear and the need for time to repair it before I collapsed.

So, a few weeks ago, Mark volunteered to watch the kids while I took the weekend off. It wasn't anything fancy, just a cheap room in a nearby hotel for two nights. And I didn't do anything fancy, just slept and watched a few cheesy movies I'd rented. But when I came back home, I felt so much better. As soon as I walked through the door, Mark said, "You look so much more relaxed." And I was.

I was also profoundly grateful that, guilty as I felt about taking time for me and spending money (especially with both the economy and Mark's work situation a little shaky) on me, I was able to do it: able to have the resources and help I need to make it possible right now and able, through the past years I've spent working my recovery, to ask for what I need and allow myself to do it.

When my son was first born, I actually spent some time doing that thing that we stay-at-home moms supposedly spend our lazy, bon-bon eating days doing: I watched television. Now, I know, folks who haven't actually been stay-at-home parents to a colicky infant -- whose poor little nervous system hated the bright, loud world outside the womb -- have this image of what it means to stay at home and watch TV all day: comfortably clad in pajamas, with feet up and snacks and cool drinks within easy reach, the idle mom flicks through television channels weighing the merits of Oprah vs. Ellen, a rosy baby sleeping peacefully in a bassinet somewhere. So for those folks, let me set you straight right now. That ain't how it goes. And believe me, I wanted that to be how it goes. Why do you think I signed up for this whole Mama gig in the first place?

Those days I spent watching TV have this blurry, disjointed dream quality in my memory. Were there multiple days? Or was it all one long day? I think it's really all a single day, months long, in which I'm never really awake but also never fully asleep...

I doze for an hour here and there and then gaze out at the world through glazed, foggy eyes for a few hours before nodding off again. I'm some weird, ironically life-giving combination of a vampire and those red eyed soldiers in the movies who've been subjected to some experiment that takes away their need to sleep in order to create the perfect killing machine. The curtains are always drawn whether from migraines or because I'm nursing. The baby only consistently stops his piercing screams when I'm nursing, so I'm almost always nursing. Some days I just don't bother to put on a shirt at all; I walk around in huge, industrial nursing bras leaking milk like a giant cow.

When I put him in the bassinet, he screams like he's on fire. I haven't showered in days. I'm too exhausted to get anything to eat or drink, and besides, if I move, the baby will wake up and scream. It's like sitting with a live grenade on my lap. I haven't slept more than two hours at a stretch in weeks, maybe months. The TV is my constant companion, full of adult human voices that distract me without demanding any mental energy. I long for the day when I can stop watching reruns of Law and Order (every last incarnation of it) and what? Grocery shop? Vacuum? Do dishes? It's all a treat. Really.

Now that the kids are older, I rarely watch TV. When they are around and awake, I don't want to watch the kind of awful crime dramas I like to watch. And when they are asleep or off at school, I have, well, all those years of things to do that didn't get done when the kids were smaller. Just the other day I was cleaning out my closet and found half-written thank you notes for baby gifts. My son is eight now, people, and my daughter is five. I'm a little behind. But I would like to live out that fantasy of just kicking back and watching TV. I don't know. Maybe today. While I'm folding laundry. And finishing those thank you notes.

There's a picture of me somewhere, when my son was a few months old, sitting at the computer and uploading pictures of him to share. I got lots of advice to sleep when the baby slept. I was told by plenty of people that those early sleepless days of parenthood are temporary, that things settle down eventually and I would sleep again. When that shift happened, I would have time for those things I ought to put off in favor of sleep now. That all made sense to me, yet I look at that picture and think about how isolated I felt and how desperately I wanted to do something that wasn't caring for an infant or sleeping, in spite of my utter, mind-numbing exhaustion. I was shocked at how completely my life, and even my body, was not my own anymore and I was determined to wrench some part of my time back to me, even at the cost of much needed rest.

I can't always see what self-care looks like. Was it good self care to push through sleep deprivation to do something that was fun for me and helped me reach out of my isolation to connect with loved ones? Or was it bad self care to add to the exhaustion that exacerbated my postpartum depression and contributed to near daily migraines?

It's something I struggle with to this day. I've had a tough week, full of difficult situations and painful emotions. And I've had to ask myself: is it good self care to skip exercise and meditation in favor of sleep or to skip sleep in favor of exercise and meditation? It's certainly not good self care to down several sugary, caffeinated Cokes and handfuls of cookies in order to stay awake. But it's also not good self care to snap at my kids and my husband because I haven't been able to carve out a quiet moment to myself to connect with my higher power and unwind.

The best I can do is feel my way through, because while I don't always know what self care looks like, I do know what it feels like, and I know, based on how I feel now, that whatever I have been doing, hasn't been quite the kind of self care I need right now.

Many years ago, before we had children, my husband bought me a small fish tank for my birthday. At the time, I wanted a car. I didn't really think he could buy a car, but I was relying on a very iffy public transit system to get to work, so I half hoped. His only clue ("it's pink") did not seem encouraging, but maybe he was buying one used. From a Mary Kay lady. He was definitely very excited and spending a lot of time in preparation and whispered conferences with friends. When the big day came, he proudly unveiled the tank, complete with pink gravel.

Over the years, we've had a variety of freshwater fish, from tropical to ordinary old feeder goldfish. We once had a fish give birth to tiny babies, whose growth was somehow stunted, perhaps from my over-caution in keeping them too long in a small breeding section of the tank. When my son Austen was born, the tank was home to one large angel fish, who had outlived all the rest.

As an infant, Austen screamed -- piercing screams -- nearly constantly when he wasn't nursing, which I did nearly constantly to keep him from uttering those awful screams. He had (even for a newborn) problems sleeping. He was different, more intense, more needy from the day he was born, from before he was born. And I felt like I was living my life clutching a live grenade that could explode at any moment.

In the anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation and sheer overwhelmingness of those early days, the fish tank fell into neglect. The water got murkier as it was cleaned less often. And when the last of the fish finally died, we didn't replace them, but let the tank stand empty. My memories of that time are fuzzy -- events run together and odd things stand out, disconnected -- like one long waking dream. And one of the disconnected, fuzzy memories that's weighed on me over the years was of purposely starving the last of the fish when my son was an infant. I remember lying in bed and willing myself not to get up and feed them. I wanted to be free of them, but I felt awful letting them die. Well, they could eat the algae or they were better off dead anyway, I'd tell myself. I remember the tank getting so cloudy and black that I wasn't sure when they had died. And over the years the thought of that tank haunted me.

I eventually cleaned it up and restocked it with fish. Currently, it houses one lone goldfish, as I never have gotten back into the habit of keeping it up well enough to feel comfortable with anything higher maintenance or less hardy. But as I was feeding that fish the other night, I was overcome once again by that familiar guilt and shame for the fish I'd starved. Or, it suddenly occurred to me, had I? Had I confused a dream for reality? Wouldn't Mark have fed the fish if I hadn't? It was hard to know what happened back then. Everything was such a muddle.

I turned to my husband, who was lying on the bed, and said, "I have this memory of purposely starving my fish when Austen was born. Only I'm wondering now if it really happened that way or if it was a dream." And Mark said, "That doesn't sound at all like anything you'd do." And it was true. I've been known to bring home and tend to everything from wounded birds to baby squirrels to stray kittens. And I'm obviously the kind of person who spends years plagued with guilt and shame at the thought that I might have killed some pet fish. But I was crazy back then. Crazy with post-partum depression and anxiety and the weight of Mark's growing addiction pressing down (although I didn't know that's what it was at the time). I wasn't me. Who knows what the crazy-me did?

If Mark was right and it didn't make sense that I was a fish murderer, then what had happened? I concentrated. Wasn't Angel the only fish left in the tank when Austen was born? He was. I had written it in the baby book (one of the few things I wrote in the baby book); next to "Who was there to greet you when you came home?" I had written "Our fish, Angel." And I hadn't gone out and restocked the tank. When Angel died I left it empty. So what fish could I have killed?

Then it came to me: it was the baby fish I remembered killing, because I remember thinking I couldn't tell when they had died; the water was so murky and they were tiny and good at hiding in the plants. And the puzzle snapped together. I was lying in bed willing myself not to go feed the empty tank again, because the crazy, panicky part of my brain was telling me that I couldn't know what wasn't there. I had been feeding the empty tank after Angel died. Maybe, I thought, those little fish that I thought had died long ago were still there in the plants. Maybe they needed me to feed them. I couldn't know, and I shouldn't starve them.

The guilt and shame melted away, transforming first into relief (I was not a fish murderer!) and then into delight at the metaphor for so many of my relationships: carrying guilt and shame for years because I hadn't perpetually fed an emptiness that I thought couldn't live without me. It's a good thing Mark didn't get me a car; I wouldn't have felt nearly as bad for not putting gas in it when it broke down.

I have always loved the end of the day, when everyone else is asleep and I can finally be alone with my thoughts. When I was a child, I would fight sleep so that I could spend more time indulging in the wonderful escape of daydream and fantasy; I would feel myself drifting off and jerk myself awake to come back to some thread of a story I was telling myself. As I grew older, and especially after I had kids, I'd spend my evenings waiting for the world to fall asleep so that my work could end and my own time begin. At last I could answer e-mail, read a book, take a shower, watch TV, eat a slow and leisurely dessert. No one wanted anything from me anymore, so the tiring pull at me was gone. I could finally let myself think about and take care of my own wants and needs now that everyone else was taken care of and couldn't possibly ask for anything else. But there was still one major, glaring omission in my after-hours self care regimen: sleep.

I am horribly, chronically sleep deprived. I have been for years. I know I don't get enough sleep. I know I function better the next day — am a better person, better parent, better partner, better friend — with more sleep, and yet I can't seem to let go of pushing myself to stay awake and savor that time alone, just like I did as a child.

The past few weeks have been difficult for my husband at work, and his project has spilled over into evenings and weekends. He warned me ahead of time that this might be the case, and I gave myself mental permission to take things easy. Earlier this week, I took steps to line up playdates and childcare for the kids to give myself a little respite this weekend. And for the last few days, I've found that at the end of the day I'm tired and ready to sleep without pushing to do one more thing and one more thing. I've gone to bed at a (for me) reasonable hour. I've gotten seven or eight hours of sleep. Having taken care of myself during the day, I just haven't felt the need to push further and further into the night to get what I've deprived myself of all day. I've given myself enough to give myself permission to sleep. It feels like a tightly coiled spring inside me has released.

And having said that, I've done all I intended for today too and am going to sleep.