Wake 'n Worry

It seems like you no sooner bring a baby home from the hospital than insensitive people start asking if she's sleeping through the night yet. New parents, especially breastfeeding moms, become intimately acquainted with the post-midnight hours. Sleep deprivation and exhaustion cause a haze of delirium to settle over the household. But that's all part of the picture. Tiny, new people are not designed to sleep through the night and in most cases they don't. From my status as Crone and Metaphorical Grandmother I will tell you there are two questions NOT to ask a new mother: Is the baby sleeping through the night? and When are you going back to work? Believe me, she's working. So don't be an idiot.

I was lying awake at 3:30 this morning thinking about all this. When my first baby was born, I used to sit in the rocking chair in the bay window of our upstairs bedroom and nurse him in those dim, early hours. The streets were utterly quiet. It was November and snow was already on the ground. Much as I missed my sleep, there was something amazing about those times, a stillness, as though the earth and I were breathing in sync.

Now, nearly four decades later, I am once again up in the middle of the night, this time with my mother, who is on the other end of life. It's not quite as easy to feel that sweet solace of the night; she's not as little and cute as a baby. But sometimes, I've had a similar feeling once she's back in bed and has drifted off to sleep.

I'm taking a poll here. Raise your hand if you always sleep through the night. Raise them high. Uh-huh. Just as I thought. As crazy as we are to have the most vulnerable people in our care sleep through the night, most of us don't do it ourselves. Getting up to go to the bathroom is maybe the number one motivator, often more than once during the night, depending on what we've been doing and how old we are. No getting around it, it's better than the alternative. Or maybe the dog barks, a storm comes up, the bed partner is snoring, a dream catapults us into wakefulness. Women of a certain age spend much of the night throwing covers off and on due to temperature fluctuations, which seem to slide right into intractable insomnia.

And how many of you stay awake for awhile after being awakened? Hands up. What do you do then? Probably don't think about how grateful you are to be awake in the middle of the night, especially if work beckons in the morning. It's the wake and worry time. Money, kids, money, health, family members, job, burglars, pets, money, job,  and performance anxiety. Oh yeah, and the car. And the house. And, on a really bad night, death.

I talk to so many people who say "Oh, you should have called me" when I say I've been up with Mom. It makes me wonder if there is anybody who really sleeps through the night all the time, or if that's one of those closely held secrets that people don't talk about much. Which gives rise to the myth of the baby-who-sleeps-all-night.

Mom is moving to an Alzheimer's assisted living place tomorrow. My nighttime foraging and worry-fests will be reduced, but I don't expect them to disappear altogether. I still have plenty more diseases to conjure up in the night, lots of financial crises to tend to (which always involves a great deal of mental math at 3am) and as the days tick away, the old standby, Grim Reaper.

Should I give you a call the next time I'm up in the wee hours?