Okay stop.
Sleep.
Lack
of.
I know many of you feel my pain.
As has been
well-documented on one or other blog of mine, Evie doesn’t like to sleep.
Actually that’s not true. She’s fine about sleeping as long as I am with her at
all times. From getting into bed, to reading stories, to waiting hours while
she falls asleep, to being in physical contact for the entire night (Me. Who
sleeps best alone in the dark and silence.), to being reassuring when she wakes
every night at about 2am, to being there to lie on whenever she chooses, to
being the first thing she sees when she wakes up. As long as all those things
are in place (i.e. I am in place),
then she doesn’t have a problem. But after nearly three years of spending
almost every night of my limited spare time staring through dim light at a
bedroom wall, while a child spins like a plate on my arm, I do have a problem. Call me a crap mother
if you like but this is not how I want to live my life and I will disagree with
you.
Evie’s a
high energy child even compared to her high energy, male cousins. It’s not just
physical; her brain is whirring all the time. She stopped napping on a regular
basis when she was about two and a half. She now sometimes falls into a deep
sleep at about 5pm and then raves all night, topped up by Satan’s Nap. She is
unwakeable (that’s not an actual word but ykwim) from these naps for a good 15
minutes, which appears to be long enough to wreak havoc on her body clock.
We tried
co-sleeping but we don’t have a huge bed, can’t afford a huge bed and she is
almost as active asleep as she is awake. It doesn’t work for us. Love the theory,
loathe the practice.
She has one
parent who is almost permanently jet-lagged and who is sometimes asleep during
the day, sometimes wide awake at night. She has another parent who is almost
certainly perimenopausal and incapable of much at all without a good, solid
eight hours sleep. Preferably ten hours. So the sleep deprivation is not just
Evie’s thing, it comes from all three of us.
Meanwhile we’re
trying to make sure she gets the best possible start to her life (and the best
possible life right here and now) while planning for the second part of our own.
My usual coping strategy is to soldier on as if everything is fine. Set my
shoulder against the obstacle, my fingers in my ears, sing and just. keep. pushing.
I’m a Taurean, that’s my job.
We go
through phases. We’re all always A Bit Tired but it’s okay - we’re middle-aged,
she’s three, that’s how it is - but there are also crisis phases. We are
currently deep in a crisis phase. We’re all whiny, grumpy, short-tempered,
frustrated and unable to function properly during the day. It can’t be long
before we fall back into the cycle of illness that comes when you’re run down
and have low immunity. Evie is permanently in that exhausted state that kids get into usually an hour before bedtime: we're getting tantrums, hitting, shouting, wailing, defiance, screaming at any given time of the day... And when it gets as bad as it is this week, our
relationships are damaged because believe me when I tell you fuses are not just
short, they’re non-existent.
And so it
came to be that I found myself, at the weekend, before the last two nights in the seventh circle of
hell, thinking that I’d try to find some time to look again at my crazy Mondo
Beyondo list. Maybe while I was staring at a bedroom wall. Perhaps I’d try to whittle
it down into big but realistic things. Shorten it. Focus.
Well last
night I realised what my Mondo Beyondo list is. It’s one thing. It’s sleep.
That’s it.
1) Sleep for all of us.
How’s that for minimalist? Everything else can
wait, it really can. Charlie and I were discussing plans the other day and he
reminded me that in the middle of the 3YP is what is now a 1YP: we get by
financially, as we are, until a year from now when Evie starts school, I either
work full-time again or work part-time and do something else independently, and
we save £lots a month on nursery fees. So my obsession with finding some way to
earn an extra buck today has
subsided.
Everything else I want to do is then, a luxury
(sort of), be it dreaming, wishing, planning even doing. And this latest bad
sleep phase has pulled me up sharp. I’ve been talking recently about
simplifying our lives, about finding a place of peace for my family now, with what we have now and I need to put in more work on that. As with any relationship
or endeavour, the nurturing
is ongoing.
Until we’re all functioning at more than 30%
then the chances are we're not even close to appreciating what we have, bad choices are being made, plans aren’t well thought
through, wishes are skewed and hopes…well hopes aren’t even getting off the
ground. The foundations aren’t there and I’m all about the
foundations right now. If I’m going to be dreaming big and doing big things, I want to
build a solid base and do it properly.
I’m not going to give up on everything that
keeps me rooted in my identity as an individual. I don’t see that as having any
kind of positive long term effect on my family. I need to model managing and coping
strategies to Evie, not just roll over and give up. Also, if I give up my self, I’m the only one of the three of us
who will and that way deep resentment lies. Not to mention a first class
martyr complex. Not pretty and not fair on those around me. But I have a family, a child, a home and responsibilities that come with immeasurable joys attached when I pay attention. My personal stuff usually
comes third or fourth after my family and home anyway and for now it’s going to
have to have a quiet period – which is no bad thing for me at this time of year
when SAD looms and I go a bit crazy anyway (what? you noticed?).
I generally only blog at work because I can
concentrate at my desk. I have some major deadlines coming up so I may be
absent for a while. I may be even worse at replying to email than I usually am.
I’m sorry, but I’m having some early nights.
