Sleep in the Mother Zone

Strange how illness enters. One moment I’m sitting on the couch watching TV, ten minutes later I realize I have a sore throat. Thirty minutes pass and I struggle to swallow. At 2am when my husband comes to bed, I sit up to rub Valerian on my feet. He says something random and all I think about it sleep. I’m not getting it.

What is it about men? My husband works very hard, it’s true. Even so, he makes sure he gets his sleep. That’s enough to piss me off. Since River was born, my body has been an extension of hers – or hers mine – not sure, just that in between waking and sleeping (at any hour), she is on my body. If I so much as turn in the other direction, she protests. Sometimes I say, “Oh my god, girl, let your mama rest here, just for ten seconds.” Meanwhile, the sounds of sleep next to us, my husband dreams while I skull the space for a spot to pull over and stop driving. Little hands in my face, twirling my hair (ouch!), fingers like feathers across my lip – which makes any sane person profane in seconds.

I come home in the middle of the day to find him napping upstairs (the gal!). Hate that I resent it, but what can I say? He tells me this weekend that he has so much work to do, and when I return late afternoon from the park, he walks downstairs, happily rested, “Wow, I slept that entire time! I should get started on my work now.” Right. So I head to the kitchen to start dinner. Whatever.

Did I mention that I have an eighteen year-old stepdaughter? That’s all I’ll say – you can take it from there. Just think daycare and college planning in the same breath. I’m the one that figures both. I think of my mother; as I pace in the kitchen, bitter wife-person that I can be, and, shocker, I think – drinking, good choice.

Only it’s been done. Way overdone. So I just go to Peet’s. It’s not like a ritual. It is my cult ritual, tear down anything that stands in my way, ritual. Pretty tame, right? That and Grey’s Anatomy.

She sleeps now out back. I look around – must be something for me to do. Yes, plenty. But illness has that way of making me lay down. Lay down the body. Lay down the habit of sitting up.