Small talk, big talk

I’m sure most mothers are convinced their children are overachievers, and I’m no exception. But I will admit that my son, E, really underachieves when it comes to sleep.

Over the last three years, I’ve become obsessed with finding out which one tiny thing I need to change so that we can sleep more than two hours in a row. One degree difference in the temperature of our bedroom, two extra calories consumed at suppertime, bedtime story told three decibels higher.

One night, late last autumn, I introduced a nightlight. It was going to be the panacea. It was one of the worst nights he’s ever had. I usually endure the nights without R – but this time, I roped him in for help.

The next day, we wangle some rare childcare. We walk from the car to a coffee shop, and exchange some words, but R’s are getting stuck at my ears and mine are getting caught in my throat. The low autumn sun illuminates the scattered late-morning passersby, but they’re in another world. My existence, and most of the facts decorating it, are left in yesterday.

And then, the hit of coffee aroma, and I long to be in a different body, one that isn’t so sensitive to caffeine. R stumbles over our decaf order.

‘I didn’t get much sleep last night,” he says. We somehow manoeuvre language well enough to allude to a child being the cause.

‘”Oh, I get it,” says the woman behind the counter.

I look up, squinting through the sun bouncing off her face, and examine every crease of it as she looks at us with half amusement, half sympathy. I want to believe she knows exactly what we’re talking about. I want to see her through this fog; I need an ally in this moment, someone with this suffering in common, so much so that she doesn’t feel the need to elaborate.

I laugh a weak laugh, but really, I want to ask her, tell her: the mood swings and anxiety, fatigue and short term memory loss, the fear of what this is doing to my body, that I’m slowly losing my mind, the muffled, muted greyness of the world, the insidiousness of it all.

I want to tell her that this sleep deprivation obstructs the process of me connecting with the world because simply observing other people getting on with their lives – doing or undoing any little thing – exhausts me, makes me feel like another species.

It’s all fun and games, isn’t it, I say, or something along those lines. I smile at her as she hands me my drink, say thanks when she tells me to enjoy it. All the things I could say, but we’re caught in a small-talk stand-off.

R and I perch on the bench outside the coffee shop and try not to talk about how tired we are. We last a minute or two; maybe it will all be okay, maybe it is okay.

I put the cup to my mouth and take a sip of my pointless decaf cappuccino. My lips start tingling and I quickly realise I’m allergic to something, must be the milk. My heart speeds up, yet I also feel the blood start to drain from my face. I grab R’s sleeve and look him in the eyes, hoping it won’t be the last time I see him. I wait for the reaction to spread through my body. Nothing. I look down and realise that what I actually felt was the cappuccino foam, tickling my lips.

Small talk, I decide, is very dangerous.

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“Did you have a good Christmas?”

“Yes thanks, did you?

“Yeah, quiet.”

What I really want to tell the many people I’ve had this exchange with is that, although two weeks off nursery with my own child should be pure joy, the punctuated nights – and the confusion of taking part in a tradition just to please and placate, and why, since having a child, such customs keep catapulting me into existential unease – make me resent the question I’ve relentlessly asked and answered.

I realise that all this gloss – which I’m either engaging in more, or simply noticing more – is getting in the way of my being able to gauge what’s normal. Having a small child takes a lot of parents (okay, mothers) out of consensus-taking society, away from full-time work, grown-up spaces and daily adult interactions. Subsequently, I don’t know if I’m tiring easily, or if I have eyelids of steel. I’m not sure if my son’s sleep is presenting a relatively horrific test of endurance, or I just need to get a grip. Among the jokes and eye rolls about how tiring kids are, I wonder: how tiring are kids?

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My son has made up a song. The lyrics, in total, are: ‘Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t’. He has a remarkable habit of singing it at R and I just as we’ve reached an impasse in conversation about something big and stressful. I can’t imagine what it will be like when he can properly be involved.

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When I was growing up, the conversation around global warming – at least, among us lay people – was in its infancy. In the 1990s, many things were still unfolding, hadn’t yet revealed to us the terrifying direction humans, left to their own devices, are taking the planet and all of its inhabitants.

Subsequently, there was a time where I believed in the good of humans at large. I didn’t see the race to the bottom. I know this, because I still have the capacity to be surprised – surprised we’ve passed the 1.5 °C benchmark, that another famous man has a trail of sexual abuse behind him, that another corporation has been taking advantage of its employees.

I wonder if my son will be allowed that same ignorance, if he’ll have a window of time where he also believes in the net good of the human race. Or perhaps he’ll always assume that we’re going to make ourselves extinct. I’m sure that most conversations he overhears are related in some way to the ills of modern neoliberalist society. Realising that our entire worldviews will be different makes me worry that there’ll be a distance between the two of us, too.

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When it’s just the two of us in the middle of the night, in the moments after being dragged out of deep sleep, I talk to E like an adult. I tell him that humans need sleep. How can he not understand, I think, with my head in the pillow, gearing up for another half an hour of helping him back to sleep. How did he not understand this two hours ago, four hours ago. But he climbs onto me and nestles his head under my chin. Sometimes, he gets it.