Read forward with caution: I have not slept for two consecutive nights, and given that I am now typing this at 3:38 a.m., tonight is looking to snap to new terrifying form as well. All the baby books say this is normal for a pregnant woman, that 78% of all pregnant women experience some sleep disturbances. I read this, and naturally think, well that’s bad for them, but for me this is much, much more horrible.
Because it’s me.
I have never had sleep problems. I am not one of those people who can fall asleep sitting up, the type you see with their head bobbing on the bus. As a child, I never had a hilarious episode involving my face and a bowl of soup. But as long as I have had a place to be horizontal, sleep has been my easy wingman. I’ve been a smoker, a lover of wine, a user of all manner of psychedelics, a person who partakes in rich meals and coffee late at night, never mind the burbling pot of anxiety constantly roiling somewhere between my neck and solar plexus. As my beloved grandmother used to say, albeit in Hebrew, and as part of some enormous, Tel-Aviv sized guilt trip, “me, from worry, I know.”
But the Sandman has always just come. He dumps his sand, or fairy dust, or gold-flecked holy ambrosia, or whatever the heck it is the Sandman has, on my head, or wherever the Sandman leaves his effluvium, and I’m out until the morning.
What I do know about insomnia I know from Mike, who is a seasoned terrible sleeper. When we first met, 14 years ago, he was prone to lying in bed, waiting for some little flake of rest to land on his eyelids, while blaring talk radio or hockey highlights at volume 11. This was something someone taught him to do as a child. Someone who clearly never imagined little Mikey grown up and with a wife and a sex life: voices in the box will keep you company when you can’t sleep at night. There are photos of him, 8 years old, in his little baseball pajamas, with a transistor radio on his night stand and a skin-coloured mono headphone in his ear, the wire trailing across the pillow like an umbilical cord.
Today we sleep with Mike’s satellite-radio hooked iPhone in bed with us. It’s me and Mike and Ira Glass and Terry Gross. I can tell whether it’s This American Life or On the Media by the pattern of buzzing sizzling from his earbuds. I keep on leaving newspaper clippings on the breakfast table about cell phone emissions and cancer, but to no effect. I beg for “airplane mode,” but something deep in Mike’s psyche needs our bed alive with something reassuringly daytimey, and he usually forgets to change his settings, so the bed starts bleeping and blooping and vibrating at 4 a.m., which is when the emails from Europe begin coming in.
Of course this week, the one week I, master sleeper, find myself up at five with a reeling mind and innards that would very much like to jump out of my skin and run a marathon, the one week Mike and I could have been all cute together, the midnight blinker and his gravid wife, each with one earbud, having a little non-siesta fiesta with Terry Gross, he’s in Banff, at a television festival.
So instead I’ve stayed up, thinking about not sleeping. Two nights ago, before it became increasingly clear to me that I will likely never sleep again as long as I live (which is – now 4:48am — tonight’s conclusion), I tried making a pleasant event of the fact that it was three and a half hours past midnight and I was still nowhere near rest-ready. There are worse things than being the only person up before dawn I told myself. I used to write only at night, waiting until 6 p.m. to start my workday. I used to smoke out my bedroom window at my mother’s house, dreaming of being an adult. I now made a giant sandwich, with lettuce and cream cheese and a cut-up pickle — a sandwich like a pregnancy joke leftover from mid-century — and sat on the balcony outside my office, watching the tree outside it (one I have never been able to identify, with round and noisy leaves that push between the railings of the balcony) ,trying not to be afraid of the bats that live in its branches.
I thought of the evening, about five years ago, that a bat flew into the house and how it really did look like an evil hovering shadow, some spectral night being, something you could only catch with the corner of your eye, and how mike killed it with his Prince tennis racket, while I screamed from under a hastily constructed fort of sofa cushions. Mike put the dead bat in a plastic bag, and put the bag on the balcony, to be thrown out the following morning. But when we went to look for it the next day it was gone : the bat in the bag, as if it had never existed. I told Mike it seemed like some metaphor for something, but I couldn’t think of what.
I have not been a sentimental pregnant woman so far. Mike has been kissing my stomach and calling the manifestation inside it “my wittle winkie,” and doing all kinds of that sort of thing, but I have been more or less just getting on with life as normal, albeit surrounded by a chorus of mothers telling me to enjoy that now, because my life will never be the same again. My stomach is now round, and I can imagine something in it, which is new, and which the books say is part of the reason for my insomnia. I can’t sleep because I am anxious about things to come.
So I will admit that about twenty minutes ago (5:21 a.m., oh god help me) I did have a few words with the being in my womb. I said I was sorry that I hadn’t slept in 72 hours, and said that I hoped I wasn’t hurting it. Then I wrote that paragraph about the bat — which may or may not work with the rest of this column, I am too wired out to tell — and now I am going to do the pickle sandwich thing again. Mike will be back in bed with me tomorrow, with his warmth and his phone reminding me that he is there, and something tells me that is when the sleep will come.
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