I couldn’t sleep last night. Despite being quite tired at 10:00 and falling asleep right away, I woke up about 2:00 and was up for the better part of two hours. Two ‘kitty naps’ during the day made the ground fertile for insomnia, but the seeds of sleeplessness sprang forth from a litany of minor to moderate concerns. The air conditioner running on and on and on struggling to keep up with a warm humid night sprouted first, thoughts of my chartreuse green swimming pool came soon after. Work soon made an appearance in my mind courtesy of my reading emails filled with tales of woe despite the fact I’m on vacation. I got up and consumed some cookies and milk (definitely not on the diet) in an effort to put me in a food coma which started to work until the dog objected to Bosslet 3’s exercise of her newfound rights as an adult to come home at 3:00 in the morning. Sleep finally came (at least I think it came) with the recitation of random words as they came up in my mind. I’d give an example, but that’s probably too deep of a dive into my psyche.
I was afraid of the dark when I was young. I wasn’t so much afraid of monsters, but of some nefarious person breaking into the house. I had a nightlight in my room and there was another in the hallway, but my parents always kept the hall light on in our ranch-style home until they went to bed. Bedtime was 9:00 back then. I would generally hear them watch their 9:00 show and sometimes their 10:00 show as well. When I heard the local news come on at 11:00, I started to get anxious – the hall light would be going off soon. Panic would begin to seep in when I heard the theme for the Tonight Show come from the television. As soon as Johnny’s monologue was over, the light was going off. When the light went off, I toughed it out some days. Other times, only crying for mom could make things right.
I spent the overwhelming majority of my first twelve years of full-time employment working midnights. While I liked working at night, I did not enjoy the lifestyle of working at night. Early on, I found that one of two things happened with that schedule – I was either going to be miserable the days that I worked or the days I was off. Based on my nonexistent social life in the early days of that schedule, I chose to be miserable on my days off – sleeping during the day and finding some sort of something to do at night. In the days before widespread use of the internet, this wasn’t easiest thing to do. Sometimes I would drive around in the middle of the night for hours. Sometimes I would go to the casino and let them have all my money. More often than not, the answer was beer, lots and lots (and lots) of beer to pass the time and make myself sleepy and end up with some sort of rest through part of the night and some of the day. In hindsight, it really developed into quite a problem for me for a number of years. Perhaps I should have felt more ashamed over the looks people gave me at the convenience store when I rolled up to the cashier with a twelve-pack at 8:30 on a Tuesday morning? I happy to report that the ‘beer equals sleep’ days are behind me, it actually has the opposite effect on me these days.
By the time Ms. Boss rolled into the picture in my eighth year of working midnights, beer alone was not getting the job done. During the summer, my ten-hour shift started before the sun went down and ended after it came back up. What had been a minor annoyance during my younger years morphed into a definite impediment to sleep. Daylight streamed into my bedroom during my entire sleep schedule. My first attempt to combat this problem was sleeping in the only windowless room of the house – the bathroom. That worked like you would expect it to. I tried my walk-in closet. It tried the hallway with all the doors closed. I finally got somewhat smart and taped garbage bags over my windows with duct tape which worked well enough, but did not impress the future Ms. Boss at all the first time she found herself in that part of the house. Somehow, room darkening shades remained beyond the grasp of my comprehension (perhaps too much beer). What finally resolved this issue? moving to day shift two years after we were married.
As I mentioned previously, my twin girls turned eighteen years old this week. This means that the hardest time I ever had with sleep was eighteen years ago this week. The story of their birth is not my story to tell, but suffice it to say that the urgent situation we were face with lead to very little sleep in the forty-eight hours leading up to when they were born, four weeks before they were due. After seeing them enter this world and Ms. Boss moved to her room for the evening, I was ready to crash on the partner bed for a good night’s sleep… or so I thought. At 1:00 in the morning, the nurse rolls in with Bosslet 3 ready for feeding time (Bosslet 2, who needed some more intensive care for the evening, was handled by the nursing staff). A half and hour later, with that handled, I went back to sleep. At 4:00, Bosslet 3 returned for another feeding. At 7:00, both the twins arrived. It was a pattern that lasted for at least eight weeks – one hour of feeding, two hours of sleep, one hour of feeding, two hours of sleep. My government employer allowed me eleven weeks off, but it certainly was no vacation as I fed kids and did my best to help Ms. Boss recover. I was never so grateful as I was the first time both of them missed their early morning meal. The whole experience was exhausting. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.