Welcome To My Padded Cell

Getting up at 5am is an ass-kicker. I remember my life as an insomniac, back before I got pregnant and suddenly couldn't get enough sleep and not even the thought of Bush becoming president could keep me up past 9pm. Now I don't sleep as much as I should be but it's because I don't want to go to sleep. I fight it like toddlers do. I feel my lids growing heavy by 10pm and I prop them open with eyelash curlers so that I DON'T EVER GO TO SLEEP AGAIN.

It's truly ridiculous. I want to stay up late because I need to do what I call "unwinding" which consists of drinking beer while watching television episodes on DVD until I literally pass out on the bed and have to wake up later and get into my pajamas. I usually crash out between 11pm and 12:30am. My "unwinding" time is the only time I feel I can sit in a catatonic state not talking to anyone or doing anything besides drooling and pretending not to be half asleep every time Philip comes to gawk at his dozing crazy wife "not sleeping". It's almost as though I need to spend time in a padded cell, but there being no access to one, I do my best to improvise.

Max is not a good sleeper either. Never has been consistently a good sleeper, though for the last year and a half there's been a lot fewer night wakings from nightmares, and he's been getting up later (between 6:30am and 7am instead of 5:30am.) Now he's having a really hard time getting to sleep so he comes into my room to interrupt my very important catatonic state to announce for the thirtieth time in the last hour that he is still awake.

He waits for my response. I'm a solutions type of mom, I almost always have some solution to suggest. In this case I come perilously close to apologizing to him for passing my sleepless genes to him and telling him that there will come a day when the only thing that will interrupt his awful sleepless cycle and prevent him from going mad in a very traditional delusional way will be an extra strong dose of codeine.*

I once went three weeks with no more than one or two hours of sleep a night. I can tell you from personal experience that this is a very unhealthy experience. It is said that if humans go too long without sleep they will go insane and then die. We need to turn our internal computers off. Mine doesn't have a very good off switch. Apparently, neither does Max's. Now, why couldn't I have given him some gene upgrades? What's the use of being capable of building a human being if we can't build them better than ourselves?

I have only experienced one serious bout of insomnia since I had my kid. It was also a three week intense stint. I don't recommend it. I have come to value getting at least seven hours of sleep. Even if it's not quality sleep. There was a guy named Gerard in my dream the other night but don't worry, I didn't dream cheat on my man. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But what the heck?

To be perfectly honest, I like getting up at 5am. It is nicer to see the sun rise after having slept through some of the dark than to stay up through the dark until the sun rises.

So, obviously, the trick is for me to be like my own parent and give myself the sleep smack down: GET YOUR PIG-ASS TO BED OR ELSE YOU WON'T GET TO EAT ANY CHEESE ALL DAY TOMORROW!!!!!! Nothing scares me like a lack of cheese.

It seems I should go to sleep at 10pm. But that's only minutes after my kid has finally stopped interrupting my evening drool-fest.

Suddenly I see our real future: the kid lives at home until he's 43 (that's when he's says he's leaving home, I didn't tell him that only serial killers and/or virgin men live at home until they're middle aged, there's plenty of time to bust that bubble) and the three of us (Philip is unshaven, wearing a "wife-beater" tee and I'm in a Mrs. Roper style Muu Muu and have an impressive perm) and we're all three watching the Price is Right at three in the morning. Eating cereal with no milk. The only non-drug addicts up at that hour.

*For anyone who's suddenly on high alert- I never have taken more than a few sleeping pills in my life. I don't propose or desire that my kid take any unless he ends up experiencing the involuntary extreme sleep deprivation I experienced. I don't advocate a careless or frequent use of sleep aids. But I also don't advocate a sleepless life which is similar to experiencing torture and for any person who experiences routine sleeplessness I think they deserve to do what they need to do to get some rest. Even if they end up hooked.

I also would like to take this opportunity to mention that before any time I have resorted to manufactured sleeping aids I have exhausted all the natural remedies at my fingertips. Except for warm milk drinking because I think milk is gross by itself or with honey or whatever. Yuck. I have tried nearly every herbal, supplemental, physical, and spiritual method of obtaining sleep.

Aside from the times I haven't slept much at all, I generally don't have a good quality of sleep when I get it. Even now.

How sad. Huh? Are you crying yet at this dismal tale? Are you sorry yet that you read my sleep saga today?

Lindsay Lohan
(the floosy in the other room)

(get out of my dream already!)

I never thought my dreams would be so short of rich subconscious material that they would have to resort to including some Lindsay Lohan sex scenes. Yes, indeed, I was having one of those awful school dreams where I spend the entire dream trying to figure out how I can get to school on time to take my notes. Once there I inevitably find out that I haven't been to class for a month and there's a huge test for which I am not prepared at all.

Furthermore, in this one, I find that none of my clothes fit and I'm in the middle of a move and so I'm lugging all these clothes around that don't fit and Jerry from ER is having sex with Lindsay Lohan in a bedroom off of the classroom (because, of course the school is in an old boarding house type building with bedrooms) and the sex is super loud and impossible to ignore and I lose all respect for Jerry because I can't respect anyone who sleeps with a woman whose ex-boyfriends refer to her as "fire crotch". Good Lord.

Incidentally, Jerry from ER isn't Jerry in my dream, he's a class mate who is also an opera singer. He was also supposed to be my ride home. Don't you hate it when your ride home ends up hoein' it in a back room?

I can drive cars in my dreams. I'm always surprised in my dreams when I realize I can drive. The funny thing is that it always seems so natural and normal and I'm so very much in smooth control I wake up and wonder if I've been torturing some part of myself who's harboring Nascar ambitions. Once I wake up I'm really happy that I only drive a scooter. The big question is, why didn't I just discover I had a car in my dream last night?

I'm remembering more as I write and realizing what a very long complicated dream it was. I've always been fascinated by the fact that my dream landscape is pretty steady. It's like an alternative life in which there is the same city I periodically visit, the same hotels, the same college campuses, the same houses I live in, the same countrysides that I've been coming back to in my subconscious for as long as I can remember. It's actually quite disturbing at times. It isn't that my dreams are recurring, though that has happened sometimes too, it's more like I keep finding myself in the same places in different situations and my dream self knows I've been there before and remembers the last dream and what happened and it's eerie.

It's eerie to be living a second life in my sleep. Most of that second life has been liberally peppered with gunshots, murder (both mine and others), dead bodies, anxious school experiences in which I will never ever finish a class or graduate, war, and other horrors. It's really only in the last few years that the nightmares have become a little less regular. Since having Max. I guess having a kid has even worn out my constantly anxious subconscious. Before having Max I was plagued with the worst bouts of insomnia where the little sleep I got was ruined by the most awful nightmares which would frequently wake me up and prevent any more sleep for the night.

I used to wander around in a kind of daze after a bad night of nightmares and feel that I was caught in my nightmare world. I would see the waking world through my sleeping eyes and it seemed so strange that no one else knew what I'd just been through, that they couldn't see what I'd just seen. It seemed so twisted that they could be so blase and insensitive to the horrors my eyes had seen. I wrote a lot of poetry back then because that's the natural language of dreams. It comes from our subconscious where language is in shorthand, undiluted, and still in it's primal skin.

I remember so many of the dream/nightmares I've had in the past as though they're real memories. The division between the waking world and the sleeping one has been blurred further by the overlap, by the ability I've sometimes had to control my dreams with my waking mind. To be aware you're in a dream and to coach yourself into changing it's tide is powerful and strange. I once was dreaming that I was getting beat up on a college campus and suddenly I saw what was happening, that it was a dream, and I told myself to start kicking and punching back because it was my world and in my world I can win. I totally kicked my attackers ass and it was the most wonderful feeling. How strange it was though to have the awareness of being both the dreamer and the dreamed and crossing the line between the two.

At least Lindsay can't steal my man and have a public fight about it with me.*

*I'm making some very serious assumptions here. And I feel totally comfortable doing it too.

Thirty-seven is the new seventeen

Angelina and Carrie going somewhere fancy. I think we later got harassed by one of the scariest people I've ever met; a peer named Porche. A lot of people are not aware that I used to frequently dress in men's clothes. (Just when you were beginning to think I was as wholesome as a Happy Meal.) Though it looks like a lesbian prom picture, we were only best friends. I'm seriously wondering where my snazzy hat got off to though, I wonder if I could pull off wearing it now?

I have to confess that I'm a little tired of popular culture constantly trying to find ways to make us all feel better about the fact that we are all getting older every day, (because if we're not getting older, we're getting dead). I always see the media declaring "Forty is the new thirty!" or "Fifty is the new twenty" and it's only a matter of time before I see one like this "One hundred is the new thirty!" Nothing stops the clock from ticking but death. And that only stops your clock, not anyone else's. I get, I get it...it's to help us feel cheerful that with new technology we can feel like we're twenty years old when we are really turning fifty.

I could use some of that today I suppose. My hip hurts from getting exercise yesterday. Which makes me feel like thirty seven is the new fifty. This is beginning to happen every time I get some moderate exercise, so if I can't do any cardio, how will I ever shed the pounds? Get me out of this god damned box of torture!

Since yesterday's post, I've been thinking about how different my life turned out than I thought it would. How much happier I am than I ever believed a person like me could become. In fact, I was thinking about how I'm actually alive at thirty seven, which probably doesn't surprise anyone but myself. When I was seventeen (as pictured in the above photo) I honestly thought I'd be dead before I turned thirty. So turning thirty was a little bit of a surprise, but not freaked because I couldn't spend any time worrying about wrinkles when I was just so damn pleased to not be dead.

What I was worrying about at the time the above picture was taken:

• How I hadn't gotten more than two hours of sleep a night for three weeks. This was not a drug induced insomnia. It was a constant menace.
  

• How my mom was moving away and I had to choose to stay in trade school and make it on my own, or move to the armpit of California with her. (I'm talking about Stockton)

• How I was still a virgin and getting really tired of being teased just because there wasn't a decent guy around that I hadn't already scared half to death with my uber-coolness. Just kidding. What really scared them was probably that fact that I was so obviously flippin crazy. And so obviously a prude unlikely to put out.

• Worried that people other than my best friends would discover the bloody self inflicted cross-hatching on my arms.

• worried that I was going to flunk out of pattern drafting class. Which turned out to be a valid concern as I went on to get a D and had to take it over again. I'm happy to report that after that I got A's in pattern drafting and have excellent drafting skills.

• Worried that there wouldn't be food in the fridge.

• Worried about my brother.

• Worried that my hips and thighs were bigger than everyone else's. As a point of interest, this isn't something that obsessed me. It never occurred to me to diet back then. I knew I wasn't fat. I knew that I was going to have proportionately bigger hips and thighs even if I was skinnier than anyone I knew, because that is how my body is made. I complained about my pear shape to friends sometimes when we sat around scrutinizing ourselves in the normal way teens do. But I rarely gave it any real energy. Unlike now when my size is taking up way too much of my brain space. I never ever worried that I would get actually fat.

• Worried that my other best friend, James, would die of an overdose of something. (No need to be specific, if he had access, he would do a lot of it.)

• Worried about the self loathing that would constantly blindside me like a spiritual rapist in a dark alley of my brain. I would be feeling fine one moment and the next I would feel the black loathing crawl through my veins til it reached every blood cell in my body. I worried that I desperately needed help but had no health care and my parents were so checked out on their own trips at the time that they had no idea.

But hey, isn't being seventeen a blast?!

I don't have fewer worries today, but they sure are different.

A new one just occurred to me: what if the new people we had over for dinner on Sunday who we really like read this and avoid all contact with us in the future? I mean, I already told them I was crazy. I always like to get that out of the way immediately. But I'm pretty sure that my openness about it leads people to either think I'm kidding, or that it's a euphemism for being a fun-loving-wacky-ex-Californian. Everyone knows how "crazy" Californians are.

In spite of deciding I didn't need to do anything more than get myself to bed by ten, I managed to accomplish seven things on my list. Including getting into bed by ten pm. Then I had a night of fitful sleep with frequent awareness of not being entirely asleep. And bad dreams. You may believe me or not, but having less beer and an earlier bed time often remind me that I can easily fall back into a paralyzing insomnia. Mostly I sleep really soundly these days because if you drink enough beer you will sleep heavy. And if you go to bed only when you're so exhausted you can barely hoist yourself out of the living room chair to drag your sorry-ass to bed, you won't have a chance to know what it feels like to not be restful. You will simply crash into oblivion.

Even though I didn't sleep well, I will once again make myself get into bed by ten pm. And if I get other things checked off that list as well? Good for me.