#10. Sleepytime
Why must it be so complicated, one might wonder? Let's see if we can un-complicate things a bit.
I love sleep. Sleep is my boyfriend. I daydream about sleeping. I’m typically pretty good at it. I have been known to take a 5 min power nap between clients, as well as nap for 3 hours during the day and go to sleep that night, no problem. That being said, I do have a few hangups.
One, the absence of solid sleep my son’s first year really messed with me for a long time. I started to associate bedtime—even on nights where I could have had a potentially good night’s rest—with dread. The baby monitor indicator light blinking, threatening any fantasies of respite. Taunting me. All I thought about was sleep. When I was getting it. When I wasn’t. Who else was getting it. It’s kind of like how I’ve heard men think about sex. That was my relationship to sleep.
Second, while I’m able to fall asleep and stay asleep without incident, and mostly able to get back to sleep quickly if little man has a shout out that can’t wait til the morning, I have felt tired, veering into groggy, more days than not for as long as I can remember. I will say that nixing alcohol all together earlier this year has radically, even comically, improved this. However, sobriety is a lot of things, but unsurprisingly not a cure-all. In fact, the extra energy I now feel as a sober person has caused a new problem. Which leads me to my final hangup…
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