“But my body doesn’t feel tired,” my daughter says, her bright eyes looking up at me from her pillow, just barely visible in the dark room she shares with her twin brother. She wiggles around; he’s been asleep for awhile now.
“Okay,” I whisper, “But it’s still time for bed. Remember what I’ve told you about falling asleep. Make your body as still as a statue, close your eyes, and think about breathing in...and out. And in...and out. Before you know it you’ll be asleep.”
She closes her eyes, though she seems unconvinced, and I creep out of the room, closing the door quietly behind me.
It’s 7:16 pm and as I silently walk down the hall to my own room to finish putting laundry away, I wonder how long it’s been since my body has truly felt not tired. What would it be like, I wonder, to lay down in bed and not immediately surrender to my pillow and, ultimately, sleep?
Because I do sleep now. Five years ago, with infant twins who woke us consistently every hour or two, when having at least one uninterrupted stretch of 120 minutes was the benchmark for a “good” night’s sleep, when they didn’t sleep through the night until they were well over a year old, I thought this day would never come. Back then, rocking first one baby and then another, I thought such incredibly broken sleep would be my entire life, both then and forevermore. People told me they would grow out of it and figure out how to sleep eventually, but my own sleep-deprived brain, still fully in the thick of it, didn’t believe them.
Though even now it’s not always uninterrupted. Many nights a kid or two steal in to find my husband and me, blessedly asleep in our own bed, because they need to use the bathroom, because they need more water, because they’ve had a bad dream. Occasionally, with three kids, we’ll have a night where I swear they’ve made a deal with each other to wake up at perfectly spaced two-hour intervals, and it feels like the horror of those newborn days all over again.
Still. Those people were right. Most nights, I get the sleep experts say I’m supposed to—the 7 or 8 hours recommended for an adult my age to feel my best. This was the holy grail five years ago, when virtually all I could think about was the next time I would get to sleep, when sleep came in nothing more than stolen fragments in my day. I’ve made it.
So then why am I still so tired?
Read the rest over on the Twin Cities Mom Collective.