Sleep to Dream

 

Sleep used to be my superpower. When I was young I barely needed it, I could say yes to every invitation, attend every weird event and still show up to work in the morning. Most mornings. Sometime in my mid 30s I decided I was done going places and doing things and sleep became a priority. After so many years of playing hard to get, we settled into a very committed relationship that went undisturbed until the early morning hours of April 18, 2020.

Keanu was born at 10:09am Friday, and at 2:00am Saturday I was still awake, watching him sleep in his little cot, suspended in a misty awe in that silent hospital, when my baby started to spit up. I rolled him onto his side and he expelled a mouthful of birth gunk without opening his eyes.

It moved me like a flash flood: how fragile this little creature was, how responsible I am for the whole life of this tiny human. I thought of all the baby sea turtles flapping their way down the beach, how many of them get picked off before they make it down the sand. I thought: how am I ever supposed to sleep again?

It didn’t make any more sense once he was home. We were all expected to be unconscious simultaneously? What if something happened? What if the baby breathed or moved or didn't breathe or didn't move and no one was there to see?

So, for the first week, we slept in shifts. My husband slept 8pm-1am while I paced the kitchen holding the baby, shushed the dogs holding the baby, peed holding the baby. I sampled from the trays of baked goods our loved ones shared instead of their hugs while holding the baby. I nursed the baby and watched movies I didn’t think my husband would like. When I started nodding off I made myself write reviews. I counted the hours until I could take another Percocet and ignored the melon-sized wound in my abdomen created by the tiny person in my arms. Then we would trade. 

That lasted a week. Eventually the combination of fatigue and reality set in, and we put the baby down.

My pregnancy went so well, it seemed fair that we would have a difficult baby but Keanu was a dream from the start. The first 15 weeks of his life, he slept in eight hour stretches. I stayed awake and watched him, savoring the baby sleep lottery I'd won. Then the four month sleep regression hit and everything went upside down. He could fall asleep, but not stay asleep. His crib looked huge around him, it felt cold every time I put him down and I couldn’t blame him for waking up every 45 minutes. 

And because I knew he would wake up, I couldn’t sleep at all. I spent all night straining from the ears down, listening, sitting up, listening, eventually getting up. If he was awake or he wasn’t, I would wait. My brain got foggy, my insides twisted and stopped. Eventually I did the thing you’re not supposed to do, the thing I learned that lots of people do, in actuality, do: I took the baby in bed with me. And things got a lot better. But I still wasn’t sleeping like I used to. 

What had been a superpower became a disturbing regularity: every 90 minutes, I am awake. Every 90 minutes, I am up, awake, haunting my own house, wearing a tread between my bedroom and the bathroom, confused, annoyed at the repetition, soothed by its consistency. One night, unprovoked, it clicked: sleep was easy because you weren’t afraid of time.

I never had much of a plan for my life. The future was an amorphous mist from which things emerged, some I was prepared for, some not. It was fun. It got me to a place I liked, even if I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing there. Then I had a baby and a lot of that fog burned away. The baby is what I’m doing here. I’ve never seen this far down the road before. 

And this is what I see: It is not enough. I was 18 five minutes and three lifetimes ago. Time means nothing, and I have been a dozen people since then, at least. How many of them did my parents know? How many versions of my son will be strangers to me, how much time do I have before I meet the first one? How long before there are secret parts of him I never meet at all?

My son will grow up and become himself and I will know him less every year. But he is not himself, not yet. For now he is still mine, although he inches further away from me every day, scooting and crawling towards a future where his heart will break and his pride will bruise and he will disappoint himself and I will be powerless to stop it.

Time is a thief, you know. And it doesn’t like to work alone.

I do my best. I sleep, in five, 90 minutes stretches, which is plenty. It’s enough so that one day looks more or less like the other, and they are all lovely, a sweet haze that starts during the last stretch, when I fall asleep to the sound of my husband and son playing. As tired as I am I feel myself resisting, because I know there will be a last time I hear that sound, that delighted baby squeal, and when it happens I won’t even know it. 

When I can’t sleep I read, I scour the internet for stories of other parents who are not sleeping. There are thousands of us keeping each other company, for one reason or another. Some babies won’t sleep. Some, like me, spend their nights waiting for babies to wake up. The mood on these forums is grim but hopeful: we all know that one day sleep will come for all of us. 

Sleep will come. It will make time its accomplice, they’ll come for our nights, and we'll be so tired we’ll unlock the doors and let them in. And we will all lie there unconscious, drifting further away.

I have no idea what kind of sleeper my son is, or will be. I don’t know much about him at all yet, other than he is silly and sweet and loves dogs and is always, always reassured when reaches out his little hand and finds me. I know that he is braver every day, that he settles himself faster every night, that he seems to delight in letting the soft dark wash over him, he relaxes into each cycle with greater ease. 

So, I wait. I cannot beat time; I will not try. I can’t outsmart it, time will always know the score and I never will, I can only guess how much time is left in my half of the hour glass. But I know this: it is not enough. I know this: every second, it is running out. 

I know this: I don’t have long.