Sleeping when the teenagers sleep
When our first daughter was a newborn, I slept a lot. During the day, not at night. But calculating my daytime sleep with the night-time waking hours must have resulted in a good balance. Because at first I experienced less of the kind of wandering through days full of timelessness that I did in a waking dream. If I was successful at first, it was this «sleep when the baby sleeps» thing.
The overtiredness predicted everywhere? Not so bad, I thought unsuspectingly. Until, after a few weeks, the child's need for sleep rapidly dwindled and everyday life came knocking at the door. Now I got to know it: the permanent, latent lack of sleep with which you try to win the battle for compatibility from then on.
At weekends, I sometimes time my sleep cycles around the night bus timetable.
Arriving in a state of solid fatigue, I was cured of jumping to conclusions. Although not from the one that the lack of sleep was a phase. Of course, children grow up and their rhythms become more organised. But how unstable their own sleep would remain in the long term: I hadn't reckoned on that.
Today, the newborn is a teenager. And I could sleep whenever I wanted, in theory. But in practice, there are usually several hours between being able to and doing it. Well, at weekends I sometimes time my sleep cycles around the night bus timetable. But during the week, I reliably manage to sleep too little without doing anything.
Sacrifice late rest for sleep?
After days with full laundry baskets and empty fridges, with cancelled physics lessons and paid work, family life with older children tends to pour over you in the evening as if from a bucket. As much as I like these full hours, which always feel as if they contain more life than they can contain, I appreciate the late quiet, when only a night light illuminates the corridor and the dishwasher rumbles quietly.
Sacrifice them to sleep? Too bad. So I stay seated and scroll wearily into infinity. What a misery, such a mobile phone, I thought. Until the children dragged in this 1000-piece puzzle («to be given away for free»). Suddenly I was sitting bent over Santorini, shimmying my way deeper into the night, puzzle piece by puzzle piece. Only when the undergrowth in the lower part of the picture was complete at around one fifteen did I drag myself up to bed.
I pay with sleep for the relaxed certainty of being able to fritter away a little time as undisturbed as I am aimless.
I realised that scrolling wasn't it. But neither is puzzling. Rather, I pay with sleep for the relaxed certainty of being able to fritter away a little time as undisturbed as I am aimless. A need that used to be smaller - when it was possible to sleep when the baby slept. Today, having grown with the years of being involved, it often piles up in front of me. It is not uncommon for it to give me the waking-dream change that I managed to avoid in the beginning.
On particularly tough mornings, I wonder: why is it that nobody ever advises me to sleep when the teenagers are asleep? For all my love of late rest, this should be manageable. As soon as I've finished Santorini.
