Are You Up?

It’s time for sleep. I’ve already closed my eyes and no matter how exciting the show on television is, my lids are heavy, my mind firing blanks. I drag myself up the stairs, spit some toothpaste into the sink, put on pjs, and burrow into bed congratulating myself for having made it until 9:30. 

Bagel and Lox, my rescue dogs

Four or five hours later my bladder calls to me in a prayer I have no choice but to answer. As I make my valiant return, I read the oversized numbers on the clock, itself a miracle. I lie back down, though my mind is up and particularly poised to rerun every bad decision I’ve ever made.

Mostly these revolve around what I ate the night before, but my thoughts also have global ramifications. If the abyss past midnight isn’t a good time to revisit the mistakes I’ve made as a parent, as a friend, as a devoted relative or as a wife, I’m not sure when is? Otherwise, I’m kinda busy.

Fear of insomnia was always a particular favorite in terms of the melancholy opera I’m composing. The first act involved monsters and cockroaches that crawled around the second floor apartment on a one way street. When we moved to a six lane thoroughfare, it was the screaming ambulances and some asshole whose horn blasted, Dixie as it drove down the wide boulevard, that woke me.

For the second act of my sleep composition, the silence of suburbia proved too total. There was no traffic noise, but the birds screeched me into consciousness. It’s hard to believe there was a time I was annoyed by that. Then the kids came. Now they’re putting me to sleep. 

“Night, Mom. It’s almost 10:00. It’s better to fall asleep in your own bed.” That’s not a a complaint, it’s more a hallelujah, someone heard me.

We’ve reached the menopausal sleep portion of this production. It might not be the penultimate aria, but it is currently pivotal, if impossible to pin down. How come the middle of the night story rarely has a happy ending, when my daylight hours often do?

The fear that dogged me as a child I perfected as an adult. The pressure of keeping the inevitable sunrise at bay is still daunting.

Meditate, I tell myself in the middle of it. You have got to get some sleep. Everywhere on my time stealing phone are articles that tell me it’s the insomnia that is robbing years of my life. Between the smoking and the stress, I cannot afford to add to this list.

I never went back to the late nights even after my kids embraced them. Early morning has its advantages. The sunrise peeks in through the window, waiting for me in the cracks of closed blackout shades. There is nothing more satisfying than a house full of people I love—especially when they’re sleeping.

There isn’t a peri/post/in-the-thick-of-it menopausal woman I know who sleeps a solid eight hours. Eight hours, or even seven, is a holy grail that only children can achieve. Or a day in the sun. Or a night in the bar.

Come with me if you will, into the my middle of my last night. I fell asleep at 9:00pm. At 2:30 I was up. My husband was away at work the few days a week he has to be. The dogs curled up in their usual spot next to me, resting chins on limbs. A podcast, I thought and listened into the empty night to voices that feel intimate but effortless. 

Even my paltry math skills say five solid hours is nothing to sneeze at. Another hour and a half for frosting would be perfect. Who made up these arbitrary numbers anyway? I ate too much, my brain screams. I had two full glasses of wine. How do I even deserve a restful sleep? Maybe I’m dying.

My father went suddenly with no warning, as his father had before him. I’ve inherited my writing ability from him, why not his widow maker? Did he have any warning? I don’t remember him saying anything. Maybe he gave me a clue and I missed it. Or, was my mother’s Alzheimer’s striking me early?

If I have lung cancer, Lord knows I earned it. I decide to cycle through another podcast, but it is only more doom—readily available and relentless. Trump does this. Putin does that. A steady drumbeat into the next war.

I know. Yoga and meditation rarely fail me. That’s not a chest pain, I tell myself, it’s the relish. This is all hormonal, I half plead. I fight the urge to call my husband. He probably has to pee, too. But if he doesn’t, I don’t want to send him into his own doom spiral.

By 5:00, the sky blues a little. The brief outline of the giant pines dance outside my window. The dogs are still quiet but they’ll want to eat soon.

I feel for my ever widening stomach thinking, I should write about this. I bet there are millions of people in the postmenopausal fellowship, and I’m including the men with shrinking prostates, that see the nightmare hours as a distorted reflection of every mistake they ever thought was real, as well. Inside the dark stillness there is loneliness and loss that whispers to me from my pillow. There, I think as my mind surrenders… something to dream about. 

Before I know it someone stirs by my feet and a dog’s hot breath greets me. The newly legible clock confirms it’s time to get up, feed them and start this whole thing, all over again.