Nightswimming

I had my first cringe-inducing wish-I-hadn't-done-that parenting moment the weekend before last. It was directly caused by sleep deprivation, so I thought I would write a little bit about the lack of sleep and how it continues to make the world a bit strange. If it's not written down, I'm definitely not going to remember much about it later! After this, baby news (and half-finished emails to a dozen people) will be forthcoming.

I have to start by talking about what life is like when we're not sleep deprived -- because that does happen.

The twins' fifth and final week of non-NASA day care went relatively smoothly. They were both healthy and sleeping; I was sleeping too, and I'd gotten the hang of driving my crazy zigzag across the city morning and evening, plus wrestling the stroller in and out of the trunk. I had rested enough that my right eye stopped twitching involuntarily. With five consecutive nights of sleep under my belt, I was even having occasional heady moments of feeling capable and -- dare I say it -- enthusiastic. I got lots of work done. I shocked my boss. I felt like my head was above water. I was thinking excitedly about the cool paper I was going to mange to write this summer and planning how Dane and I could maybe take the kids on some little weekend hiking trips.

Then, of course, I ran smack into a weekend of runny noses, infected ears, trips to the doctor, and teething. Between 5 am Saturday and 1 am Monday I managed to accumulate about four hours of sleep in isolated 20 to 40 minute chunks. And I was handling it. I was keeping it together. But then I fell asleep. Deeply asleep. Thank-god-I-can-rest-now asleep. And half an hour later I was woken up. By screaming. Again.

The people who say that inflicting this sort of thing on people in Gitmo isn't torture are wrong.

The screamer this time was Tristan, fighting his poor ears. I managed to groggily pick him up and rock and pat him, but it didn't quiet him at all. So, totally deranged from the shock of being awake -- AGAIN, STILL -- I sat him down in his rocking chair, strapped him in and let him howl. I sank to my knees beside my bed and commenced to beating the mattress with both fists, silently and furiously. I just pounded my knuckles into the fabric and wished hard that there was something breakable close by so that I could throw it at the wall. I completely lost it, about two feet away from the baby. It was not a shining moment.

So, that was bad. Of course, Dane rescued me by supplying milk and Tylenol. After I got myself together, desperation pushed me to realize something that many parents have realized before: Babies go to sleep in the car.

After that, there were a few nights of nighttime driving. Of listening to REM while making loops around the Google campus, watching the wind blowing the dune grass by the Bay and wondering what all the people in the other cars were doing out at 2 am on a weekday. I've always loved the song Nightswimming -- partly because I had a habit of skinny dipping when I was a kid, and partly because it captures the sense of giddy late-summer melancholy that I remember from a swimming trip Dane and I took when we were 17. Drifting along, watching the stars reflected in the river, knowing fine times must be savored because they don't last. September's coming soon . . . .

But now, thirteen years later, drifting along the highway -- the second night? the fourth? -- watching the headlights reflected in the windshield, this long sleepless year has changed the meaning of the song for me. For starters, 'nightswimming' doesn't just evoke the idea of late-night trips to the river. Nightswimming is the process of drifting and floundering through all of the sleepless nights and days with these two babies. The giddiness and pre-emptive nostalgia are still there, but there's also a sense of detached serenity. Or maybe hope? A sense of floating through life vaguely, knowing that we'll look back on all this fondly . . . these things they go away, replaced by everyday . . . , but also a dawning realization that life has been hard lately and it's going to get easier. September's coming soon . . . .

Objectively, we have slept better and better as the babies have gotten older. The two days without sleep that drove me to try to beat up my mattress are nothing compared to the 6-week period after we brought the babies home, during which I never slept more than 2.5 hours at a stretch (but still behaved myself pretty well). The difficulty is that sleep deprivation accumulates -- or rather, that the sleepless nights have their own gravity. They suck the rest of the world down into the dark. By day, I know that I am better rested and more lucid than I was in January, February or March. But one or two nights without sleep erases all the progress. At 3 am, all of the sunlit walks to the park and the florescent work days with my computer are just bright blips in the long night we've been swimming through since last August. I wonder dimly why I'm still looking at the clock because the hands just go round and round and round.

That's not to say that all of the sleeplessness is bad. Some of it is beautiful -- downy heads and warm hands against my neck and shoulder; Dane collapsed against a heap of pillows like an ancient barn against its silo; snuffly Duncan grinning and kicking his feet in the dark; Tristan looking up at the night sky, amazed, the wind stirring his wispy individual hairs; half-dozing at sunrise with everyone in a heap on the bed. These are experiences worth suffering a little for. But most of the sleeplessness isn't good or bad, it just is. Standing in the kitchen at 4:30 am, baby on my hip, I feel like Jubal Early floating in space: "Well . . . here I am."

And here I am now, at 10:49 pm, not sleeping. If I don't go to bed soon my chances being cheerful tomorrow are "One in... a very large number." Goodnight.