Reading · Embodied Resistance

I was drowsy for decades. In my twenties, I had a nine-to-six job that left me desperate by two pm. I’d lock myself in the bathroom, close the lid of the toilet seat, and immediately fall asleep with my head on my knees, arms dangling. Eventually, someone would knock. I’d flush, only for the theater of it, turn the faucet full blast and off, then go back to my desk.

Subscribe—but first, a nap!

Later, I had babies who woke throughout the night. I got up hours before sunrise to sprint through my silent neighborhood while the babies slept. When I nursed them in the afternoon, I began to drift. So soporific, breastfeeding, the tug at the nipple, the tug of sleep as the baby’s eyelids lower, lips unlatch and part. Milk, mine, like a pearl at one corner. Only then would I shudder to sleep against the hard fabric edge of the couch for ten minutes, or maybe it was hours, as her siblings watched old Disney videos on repeat,

I had four kids, woke up before dawn, and worked late into the night when the house was still. No wonder I could fall asleep anywhere, anytime, including sitting upright on a metal folding chair during violin lessons where I was supposed to be taking notes. Driving was the hardest. How many times did I pull into the parking lot of the Molly Pitcher rest stop lot on the New Jersey Turnpike, recline the driver’s seat as far as it would go, and cover my face with the nearest hat or blanket to block out the light? How many times did I pinch myself, hold my breath, sing at the top of my lungs, just to stay awake and alive on the road?

When my kid was in Juilliard Precollege, we left our home in Philadelphia before 6 am and got back after 9 pm. During the long day, I roamed the streets of Manhattan like a Miyazaki spirit. Or, in bad weather, I haunted the study carrels at the Performing Arts branch of the New York Public Library. You could plug in your laptop, but it wasn’t safe to leave it, even for five minutes, so you couldn’t use the restroom or eat your lunch. Once, I took my laptop with me into the bathroom, leaving behind my coat to save my carrel. Inside, women hunched over sinks eating their sandwiches with their laptops under their arms. They had it figured out.

There was no place in all of New York to nap. One Saturday, it dawned on me that if I put my car in the expensive self-park lot under Lincoln Center, I could climb back in there any time I wanted. The price of a nap! This was one of the best ideas of my life. I had figured it out. In the afternoon, I made my way to the fumey basement parking space where my Subaru waited. There, among the empty cars, I spotted half a dozen exhausted pre-college parents nestled, eyes covered, behind their own steering wheels.

My children are grown now, and I work from home. I have, at long last, trained myself to go to sleep (most nights) at a normal hour. Four different sleep apps scold me mightily if I don’t. Last night, I was asleep for six hours and thirty-one minutes and received a sleep rating of 91%. My sleep debt is only 6.6%. Yay! But my readiness score is “low”—1.93 with an HRV of 37 ms. Boo? How is it that I can have a high rating but a low score? If 91% is an A-, is 1.93 a C-? I’m glad this kind of data was not available to me when I was younger—or, maybe, it would have been a good thing, a wake-up call.)

It’s a sunny, early summer day—89 degrees this morning, “feels like 100,” they said on NPR. At two pm, I’m alert, drinking hot coffee, and grinding out work for a deadline. Then, as happens in Philadelphia in summer, the atmosphere shifts. Winds roll in, the trees outside my window begin to moan and dance, and there’s a crack of distant thunder. I can feel the ozone rising, the scent of wet dirt that takes me back to childhood. My dogs’ ears prick as I rise from my desk as if some force stronger than my own mind has overtaken my body. I don’t need to control this urge, not today.

Wally, the shih tzu, has stumpy legs, so I ferry him up the stairs. Tag bounds ahead and leaps, ten pounds of coiled, bossy energy, onto the bed. He knows his job. I position Wally next to Tag at the foot, where they guard me like two small sphinxes until they, too, are pulled beneath the somnolent tide.

Fifteen minutes later, we three rise, ravenous and bright.

Outside, the dense air smacks my face as the dogs trot across the wet grass to the woods to sniff for foxes. I have an idea to follow them, barefoot across the mud and leaf rot to whatever mystery they are barking at, but first, I have to eat something, and hold on to this clarity, and write.