Insomnia

For the second day in a row, I woke up at three this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep until after four. There’s an adage that a hungry man is an angry man; the parallel would be that a sleepless Barb is a miserable Barb. Just ask my kids.

I’m not sure what it is, but in the past year I have had other stretches of doing the same thing. I wake up, thinking I will just roll over and go back to sleep as usual. Nope. I try the happy daydreaming that used to soothe me to sleep, but no, that makes me start thinking and I am lost. The thinking becomes processing, or just obsessing.

One of my friends suggested that someone else is thinking of me and some connection pulls me to consciousness, but how likely is that? It’s definitely not that I have had enough sleep. It concerns me because as a pattern it can be another symptom of clinical depression, and I don’t need to think about having to reevaluate meds right now. Really it is just making it harder to get up and get the kids to school on time. In fact, worrying about being able to do that is probably the source of the problem, in a vicious circle. I worry about being a slacker mom, and we are definitely not yet back on the school day schedule.

I Have Lived and I Have Loved
Author Unknown (Recorded on Love and Desire, an Anthology of
Poems, Dove Books on Tape)

I have lived and I have loved;
I have waked and I have slept;
I have sung and I have danced;
I have smiled and I have wept;
I have won and I have wasted treasure;

I have had my fill of pleasure;
And all these things were weariness,
And some of them were dreariness.
And all these things - but two things
Were emptiness and pain:
And Love - it was the best of them;
And Sleep - worth all the rest of them.