The 32 Year Sleep Regression

Insomnia

I’ve been having insomnia again lately, just as my kids start sleeping through the night again. It’s so unfair.

My hands and legs get prickly, I find myself lying in bed and that warm falling feeling just doesn’t come over me, I just lie there listening to my eyelids clicking as I watch that red-numbered alarm clock my husband has had longer than I’ve known him blinking later and later.

In the 10pm hour I am not yet too worried. In the 11pm hour I am anxious as I feel the next day’s quality of life decreasing. After midnight, I start to panic. 1am, 2am, these are the witching hours for me, where I’m probably eating midnight snacks and reading essays on my Kindle. I’ll be collapsed by exhaustion by 2:30am or so no matter what. I know that doesn’t sound too late, but I’ll be jolted awake by 5 or 6am and there’s nothing I can do to get back to sleep then either. My body does this new thing where if I know the kids will be up soon, electricity courses through all my limbs and reanimates me like Frankenstein’s monster from the slab and I just shamble grimly to the kitchen to get my coffee. I don’t really have a choice in the matter. Zap.

It’s 11:49pm on Monday as I draft this. I’m having insomnia again. When I realized, I started to panic. But then I thought oh, there’s a Substack due soon, maybe if I get that done I’ll get that soothing release of anxiety that allows you to sleep. The feeling of an accomplishment. The last time I tried to consciously create Feeling Of Accomplishment at night on my computer, I bought a bunch of clear plastic containers for the kids’ toys (The Waldorfians weep, but it does seem to help my kids both enjoy and put away their toys) and also a hugely expensive set of rubber road toys that I got seduced by claims of Open Ended Independent Play and It’s Made In Europe Or Whatever. That one didn’t live up to the hype so far, just insanely expensive, and that was probably a mistake.

Anyway, it’s Monday for 5 more minutes, my Substack is due Wednesday morning. If I write this now, even if I have another 3 hours of sleep night, at least I won’t have to worry about my post tomorrow.

Why am I Not Sleeping?

It’s always something. I have bouts of this, usually when there’s some unopened can of anxiety in my life. Recently, I had serious real estate anxiety and couldn’t sleep a few different nights. Now there’s something else going on, some frightening health problems, and I can’t even browse Zillow about it.

And of course, after a bit, the lack of sleep becomes its own self-perpetuating source of anxiety: I should be sleeping, I can’t sleep, it’s bad I’m not sleeping and I’m tensing up with fear about it. But maybe if I write, I will stop worrying about the sleep. I hate thinking about sleep. But I love thinking about writing.

Writing A Blog With Kids

How do I faithfully keep up a weekly blog post schedule, every Wednesday morning, with 2 little kids and (as of this summer) no childcare? It’s easy. If you’ve followed my blog for a long time, you may already suspect the answer: sometimes the blog post isn’t very good.

The real secret is Beeminder. I consider myself a hapless and whimsical person by trade, someone who would easily spend all day flaneusing around the streets impulse-purchasing expensive pens and listening to Broadway Original Cast Albums and feeding my kids croissants if left to her own devices, but within me is also an iron-willed taskmaster. An ambitious, cutthroat bitch who wants to succeed. To win. To impress her will upon the world. But she knows that the everyday Grace is weak and prone to flights of fancy.

So she institutes Punishment. This worked the first time when I wrote out a $500 check to my least favorite charity and told my boyfriend to mail it if I didn’t finish my Javascript Essentials course. But these days, I’ve automated my self-blackmail. There’s this great app called Beeminder where you sign up for a goal, and if you don’t do it, it charges you real money. I first started doing it to make sure I did some squats, and then I did a reading goal. When I decided to restart my blog, I made a goal - publish every Tuesday. Then, I realized that I don’t have childcare on Monday, so when I inevitably wait til the last minute, I have no pocket of guaranteed work time. Not good. So I moved it to every Wednesday, so I could use Tuesday to work.

That was awesome. But now it’s been summer, Max hasn’t been in school for months (absent a camp week here and there), and I’m still here. What do I do?

It’s not so easy. I get a quick writing session here and a hurried Apple Notes brain dump there. I try to write stuff down on my phone while I’m at the playground. I stand up with my computer on the credenza and type while my children bodyslam each other over the train set.

So anyway, the Blog

I guess I wanted to write because I always wanted to write. And good things happen when I write. And I love people’s writing. I was just reading Meghan Daum’s latest essay book, The Catastrophe Hour. God, I love her writing so much. There’s something really relatable in how obsessed she is with real estate. I’ve had like two separate 3-hour nights of sleep due to Real Estate Anxiety in the last month alone. Anyway, she also had this essay about how she ended up alone with no kids, and she just does what she wants and works on her writing, and maybe she doesn’t have as much money as she’d like, but at the end of the day, she is just pretty sure she chose the life for her and she’s essentially at peace with it. I thought that was so beautiful.

It gave me a comforting feeling to read her write that out. It was so honest and real because life has tradeoffs. Kids are wonderful, but I miss my freedom sometimes. Before I was a mother, I was a little girl who loved books and words, and now I’m both. I think that without this writing, I would be neglecting some part of myself that badly needs expression. The children are amazing. The children are wonderful. I’m not Natasha Rostova, however, I seem to desire some little time for myself and my crafts.

In the summer where I have no childcare and very little time to myself and my husband is working working working, I get a little worn out by the sheer unceasing nature of childcare. This is not to say I wish I didn’t have kids. This is to say I wish that I had scheduled a 3 mornings a week babysitter so I could get some things done, let out the feral word monster caffeinated and fresh so I’m not doing it insomnia-style while eating Halloween Candy, as I am now.

How do I get to sleep?

I tried counting to 100 in French, except I can’t remember what happens after cinquante. Septieme? Quatre-vingt? Why did I minor in French anyway?

I tried scanning my body, but my body feels weird and bad, and I keep preemptively monitoring myself for those luscious signs of relaxation that do not come.

I tried doing box breathing, but again, I got impatient waiting for the relaxation, got bored, and started chewing on The Big Scary Problems That Come Out At Night.

There are things you can do and can’t do. I am doing my best to sleep, to keep up my blog, to be a mother. But I’ve been so stressed. I hate that I can’t sleep when my family needs me the most. The things keeping me up are worries about serious issues. Something has gone wrong. I need my strength, but night after night, it’s sapped by this insomnia, this terror that I can’t understand.

The house. Where to live. It all feels so weighty. I have to research it. And I’m not doing a good enough job. I have to be quiet. I don’t want to wake the baby.

The words in my brain are accompanied by those stubborn awake feelings that won’t budge. Terror. Paralysis. The diametric opposite of that lush feeling where the warm soft feeling spreads over your body and you find yourself pleasurably wilting, nuzzling in harder to the pillow, heaviness sinking you down to that regenerating and creative space of unconsciousness that we all need after too much reality. But here I am, knowing what I need and unable to have it. Damnit.

Just as with baby sleep problems, I do think the best approach to adult insomnia is to try to roll with it until it passes rather than gnash and fret. I know some things are stewing. I know sometimes, the sleep does not descend. But I think my spell has worked - it’s 12:39 now, and I bid you goodnight.

Okay, checking in the next day: does anyone else struggle with lack of sleep when you ALREADY don’t get enough sleep from small children? Do you have any tips for this? It’s so annoying. Okay, thank you. I promise I’ll be back in childcare and have more structured essays soon. Plus, I have this theory that my reconstructed boobs are haunted. More on that to come.