Life in progress

Tag Archives: sleep


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Sleeplessness

I couldn’t sleep at all last night. Not one single wink. So I got up and had my breakfast, the kids are gone to school and my papers are done. Great, I thought. The rest of the day I’ll spend sleeping, until the first school bus arrives.

Wrong. I lay down in bed… nothing. Still awake. After an hour and a half of trying (okay, maybe the two phone calls didn’t help) I’m up and trying to figure out what to do next. I have two blog posts I want to write… except doing anything is difficult because I can’t think straight and I can barely see straight. If I couldn’t touch-type I wouldn’t be writing this.

What does one do when they are too exhausted to sleep? I’m not sure how the hell I’m going to be able to look after my kids when they come home. I’ve never experienced such a thing before.


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Insomnia

I have discovered what this insomnia thing people speak of is all about. Last night for the first time in many years, I experienced it.  And while I was tossing and turning, trying to find that sweet spot where I could settle enough to drift off, it came to me. Insomnia is for people who can choose their own bedtimes!

My kids have been gone since Wednesday and aren’t coming back from their dad’s for another week, so I’m anticipating a few restless nights to come.

Anyway, while I was laying there with the clock mocking me at 4:39am, I came up with what, at the time I thought a brilliant idea. I kept repeating it over and over in my head – not because I wanted to but because it wouldn’t leave me. It was this:

The internet was so vast, she could only end her sentences with commas,

What do you think? Brilliant? Or simply the product of an overactive brain?


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Sundays

I remember Sundays BK (before kids) as a day when I woke up in the summer to hear lawnmowers going and the scent of freshly cut grass wafting through my window. I remember waking up and going downstairs to retrieve the Sunday Sun and laying in bed with my first husband, reading the paper and thinking about coffee.

I remember Sundays of watching movies on tv and spending my day on a knitting project or going for quiet walks or long drives: destination no where in particular. Maybe for ice cream. I remember laying in bed in the spring and seeing the new buds on the trees outside my window.

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But that was all BK.

Now my Sundays are filled with cooking for the family, cleaning, entertaining a little guy with an unlimited amount of busyness about him. Sundays are about breaking up fights between my elderly mother and my young son. Sundays are about sleeping in until 6:30 if I’m lucky.

The one thing I can still hold on to?

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Coffee. There will always be coffee.


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Don’t you hate it when that happens?

I’d decided that I would stop refreshing my damned stats page, I’d stopped looking for new posts to read in my reader and I’d even gone as far as turning off the laptop.  And the other laptop. And the PC.  So I’m standing in the kitchen, making my coffee for the morning and it hits me. The perfect subject for a post. Before I know it I’ve lost count of how many scoops I’ve put in the coffeemaker (I only have to count to seven, but there you go) and I’m trying to decide whether to a) get out a pen and paper and jot down the idea or b) turn a computer back on and risk staying up yet another hour to write – and refresh – and read.

So I’m writing this now (it’s 6:46pm) but all this happened to me last night. I failed to do neither a) nor b) and now I can’t remember what my brilliant idea was. But I still got a post out of the experience, so it wasn’t a total waste. 😛


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How comments can hurt

It didn’t start as a comment directed at me, but it bothered me nonetheless. The discussion was about a situation in which a man, with a disabled wife and a small child had taken a weekend ‘off’ to visit with friends and came home to find his wife had died. The comment, on a friend’s journal, stated that the commenter couldn’t understand why, if the man loved his family at all, he would need a weekend away from them.

I am a single mother of two disabled kids with whom I live alone. I love them more than anything in the world – but I need time off! By the time their father’s scheduled weekend with them comes around, which is supposed to be every two weeks but is more often not until the third weekend, I’m all but pulling out my hair. Loving them doesn’t preclude the work that’s required to look after their every need, nor does it make up for the fact that I don’t get any more than five hours of sleep a night when they’re here.

Back to the comment: I tried to explain to the girl who made it that it’s not that clear cut – that there are many things that go into the care of the disabled and the very young. She came back to say that she knows – and that she looks after her disabled parents. I fail to see the parallel. In the end I got the last word, telling her that she is a better person than I am.

It’s probably the way the conversation was left that bothers me the most. That I couldn’t make her see I’m not a terrible person and that I don’t not love my kids because I need time to myself to recharge and re-align my emotions, still sits badly with me.

It makes me wonder whether people out there with different problems than I have are just reluctant to look deeper into the difficulties of others or if they simply don’t care to try. It’s this ‘it’s not my problem so you must be doing something wrong to make it yours’ attitude that worries me. At the same time I hope they are never put into my situation, a little part of me hopes they are. Not very altruistic, but there you go. Sentiment breeds like sentiment.


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The more

Contentment. Who has it? Put your hand up if you have everything you want. A new computer? A better place to live, of your own perhaps? A new car? Perhaps a mate? Even more followers on WordPress? Or for someone to acknowledge your brilliant work? Yes, most of us are guilty of wishing for more of that.

With the internet came this wonderful tool for being recognized. Faster, further the more people the better.  And more and more. As a society we’ve become greedier than ever before. Recognition has become the new consumer’s must-have. People are coming out of the woodwork to publish their photography and their art, their stories, and regardless of how good or how bad it is, it’s being consumed by those who want reciprocation.

Will it ever end? Will we drive ourselves into the grave staying up til all hours, sitting on our asses pounding out our work while the blood clots in our veins, eating too much or too little until one day someone finds us with a smoking keyboard… ‘But he did some great work!’ they’ll say. They may appreciate us when we’re dead. Only we died in discontentment, wanting more.

More fiction

 

 

 


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House of dreams

shadows

In my recurring dream there is a house. It can’t always be found. Sometimes it’s in the city, hidden like the one in Harry Potter, squeezed between two others, sometimes I can only find it from the back. Sometimes it’s a barn and sometimes it’s just a vacant old thing with beer bottles scattered everywhere. Sometimes it’s in the country, looking out over acres and acres of landscape through large picture windows on the upper floor. But always, it’s hard to find.

I’ve dreamed of it falling to ruin with years of neglect and transient beings and cats. I’ve dreamed of living in it and oh how grand it was, with huge sunlit rooms. Many times the rooms are hidden too. Or they will be one after another so that I have to go through one to get to the next. No privacy – never any privacy in this house. And it never quite belongs to me, but always I used to live there. And I want it back.

The house of my dreams is always sinister.

Last night I dreamed it burned. Not all the way to the ground, but there were holes in it and the damage to the upstairs was extensive. The people who owned it, with whom I was visiting, wanted to keep it but it was no longer safe. It made my throat hurt. It hurt my heart.

I want it back.


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At last!

Sixteen and a half long months since the day I began, I finished writing the first draft of my novel this evening.

I’m celebrating by going to bed.


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Sad but True

Ever have one of those days when you haven’t had any sleep the night before, and you’re just about to finally fall into bed at 9:30pm and you get a phone call from a customer you deliver the newspaper to (for a stunning compensation of 11 cents per day) to let you know that your eldest son didn’t deliver their paper today (and neither did you because you spent the day in the hospital with your youngest son) and all you want to do is cry?

I wish I could say me neither.


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Forty-something and still growing up

What is it about my life that at what should be my bed time I start acting like a teenager? I know damned well that I’m tired, and yet I refuse to do the sensible thing and go to bed.

I think that maybe it’s the quiet which lures me into wakefulness. When it’s quiet I can concentrate on writing. At night I don’t have to worry about the phone ringing to tell me someone has been misbehaving at school and can I please come and pick him up.  During the day I’m so worried that my creativity will be interrupted that I would rather procrastinate by playing Bejewelled than run the risk of starting and having to stop. Then there’s the fact that at night I can act like an adult: having a child who refuses to play silently by himself (and by that I mean if I don’t play with him he screams at me until I do – long story) is hardly conducive to sitting down to a peaceful cup of java and a pleasant read.  Oh, and wine of course. THAT I can enjoy a glass of after the kiddies are safely tucked away in bed.

After all, isn’t being a teenager all about wanting to grow up? Yeah, I’ll bitch about how tired I am in the morning…

Maybe I’m not really grown up after all.