Sunday 24 November 2013

The Vagaries of Sleep

Sleep is a funny thing. I imagine one takes it for granted until it is forcibly removed through the seismic shift that is having a baby, and then it quickly becomes a distant memory, something you think upon with longing during the succeeding months of broken nights.  You operate in a kind of fog, a haze, where your memories become altered, you can no longer complete a sentence and you can and do fall asleep happily in the most unlikely places. You take what you can get.

It is in this fog I have opted to start a masters degree.

One child who didn't sleep I could handle and I would tell people how well I was coping and how you run on hormones, or maternal instinct or some such thing. But two kids who don't sleep, now that's another matter entirely. A whole new level of sleep deprivation.

To give you some idea of what I have been dealing with in the early weeks of my course I will attempt to set the scene.

It is 8.30pm on Sunday night and I have finally got both children off to sleep after a two hour bedtime routine which involves baths, books, pyjamas, cuddles, feeding (in the case of Child 2), half an hour of singing, soothing, patting, falling asleep hunched over a little bed (me), waking up to find Child 1 staring at me with what appears to be pity, more singing, an ultimatum, falling asleep again (still me, this time standing propped up in the door frame) and finally an extended period of silence and regular breathing. I withdraw stealthily into the hallway trying desperately not to stand on the creaking floorboards and sigh with relief.

Dinner, cooked by my outstandingly supportive husband, is next which takes us to 9.30pm then it's on to reading academic texts in preparation for the following day's lectures. Attempt a Habermas' paper on the Public Sphere and fall asleep after one page. Manage to rouse myself and struggle through to the end of the chapter but not without falling asleep a further six times over the course of an hour's reading. Unsurprisingly nothing sinks in. Express milk for Child 2 for nursery the next day and fall into bed exhausted at 11.30pm.

It is at this point Child 2 wakes (teething) and requires feeding. Half an hour later I am back in bed and it's midnight. At 12.30am Child 1 wakes (heavy cold) and needs comforting back to sleep which takes half an hour. When I do manage to get back to bed I am sleeping cat-like, coiled, with one eye open, ready to spring up at a moment's snuffle or cry which comes at 2am from Child 1. This time he's quite upset, so I end up remaining in his room for the next two hours, falling asleep on the wooden floorboards beside his bed when exhaustion takes over. At 4am I am back in my own bed. At 5am Child 2 awakes for another feed. As soon as she is asleep, Child 1 gets up chanting 'morning time, morning time!'. It is 5.30am and so he spends the next hour entertaining himself with the iPad beside me in bed. At 6.30am we officially get up and the day begins.

Once we're all showered, dressed, breakfasted, lunches made and dog walked (did I mention we also have a dog?), I load up the kids (one on my front and one in the pram, backpack on and school bags attached, doing my best impression of a packhorse) and walk 15 mins uphill to their nursery. En route we see a boy of about 12, in uniform, heading to school on a unicycle carrying a violin and I am unsure if I am imaging it. If he's not a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation then the alternative is that he's just a remarkably precocious child with painfully hip parents, all of which I take an instant, irrational disliking to.

I arrive at uni bleary-eyed and exhausted, keen to impart my sorry tale of the previous night to my classmates in order to illicit some sympathy and/or admiration. However, for the most part they, being decidedly younger and with far greater freedom than I, have spent the weekend in a fog of alcohol and all manner of other intoxicants, making the most of this great city of London. They too are bleary-eyed and exhausted so offer none of the sympathy I am after. I like to think my excuse for not having completed the required reading for class that morning is somewhat more noble than those of my classmates but at the end of the day both situations, albeit at opposite ends of the spectrum, are self induced. Can I really expect any pity?



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