misplaced mama

Three pills of melatonin. Two Tylenol PM’s.  Two cocktails down.  

Three hours later.  I am still up.

Insomnia is torture.

Tonight I might as well do something with my wakefulness.  I pull the laptop on the bed.  The room illuminates blue.

This has never happened to me before.  Once in a while, late in pregnancy, I’d wake to find sleep gone.  But that was usually cured by a handful of warm bowls of cereal.  But now, there is nothing, there is just a blending of my body and the darkness and i observe it all.

Tonight I said if this plagues me again, if I toss and turn and count the thoughts racing from my head and stare out into the window at the dark sky, memorizing the polka dots of constellations, if I found myself kicking my husband awake for company and the pure rage of someone being able to sleep, if I had one more night with open eyes and throbbing head, I was going to just turn on the computer and write until my eyes bled from screen daze and I until my lids dropped shut, heavy and hard.

And as I type I am so tired yet completely and utterly awake.  Wide awake, not alert or focused, my brain is malfunctioning with exhaustion, but I am awake.  I am angry and annoyed and scared and pissed at my snoring husband.  My baby is a timebomb tick, tick, tick, any moment she will wake up and want to nurse and I will nurse her until my nipples are sore and she falls asleep and I am still awake.  Awake.  Writing in this state is near hell.  I’d rather write with nipple clips on and staples through my fingernails and jaggermeister shots funneled into my mouth via beerbong.

As buddha said:  I am awake.   Is this some cosmic sign.  Some divine designer message for me?  Do I learn to rest in sitting up stillness?  Is awake my new sleep?  Is this a sign to go out and be a stripper, a vampire, a truck driver?

I am no buddha, and nobody wants to see me strip.  I don’t like to suck blood that’s not my own.  And I am night blind behind the wheel.  I am just a mama. Of three.  My days are filled with wakefulness, wide awakefull-ness.  Running around, rag in hand, sand in toes, hands in dirt, scribbling life notes on a dried out bum wipe, hoping to post theme hear someday awakefulness.  Tonight.  I need.  To sleep.

I have a four hour road trip to take tomorrow, just me and the girls.  The trip will be canceled if I can’t get to sleep in the next 20 minutes.  I can’t drive on three hours of sleep.  And apparently I can’t sleep on three hours of sleep, either.

* * *

The past two days have been glorious.  I swam in the ocean yesterday.  Collected seaweed on my calf, dried and peeled it off hours later.  That smell of puget sound, the way it wraps around each coil of my hair, comforts me.  My feet soft from walking on sand.  My nose pink and freckled.   My shoulders berry-brown.  Each little girl lightly tanned and happy and tired from tide pool playing and rock climbing and clam digging and crab chasing.  The oldest girl, her and I held hands and braved the waves, went under all the way and came back up spurting up water, hysterically laughing.  

We lounged on a  tapestry and munched on peaches and cherries and dried nori wrapped around slices of avacado.  We chomped on cucumbers and sipped cool lemon water.  We stayed at the beach until the tide came in close to us and then  we hiked out, through green forest.   A snake came out of nowhere and hissed with us for a while.  Mia got bit by some monsterous bug while  picking salmonberries. Then we went and got ice cream: rose flavored.

Today we went to a beach by a lake, closer to our house than the sea. We took our boy dog.  Pasta salad.  Shredded carrots and beets tossed with tahini dressing.  Plums.  Apples.   The girls jumped in the lake, the water cold and satisfying on a humid day.  They ran the long grassy beach and sang songs from Pippi Longstocking.  They swung on the old school swing set and made friends with other kids but bonded as sisters.  Sisters.  That is my gift to them, to each other.  Sleepy summer days as sisters.


This is why I am here.  Summertime and the mountains and the water; lake, rivers and sea, drippy ice cream cones and warm sunny faces.  Eagle accompaniment and tonight, sleepless, listening to a medley from the coyote pups somewhere out there, outside my window, in the woods.

*My eyes are still not tired*. hail mary mother of god what the F is wrong here?

All day long my mind is worked, calculating spending, negotiating who gets what toys, creating meals, figuring out way to entertain or put to sleep or explain the world to them.  But my body is not worked.  I am not sweating and running and twisting and climbing.  I am not doing this things because I don’t want to drag all three of them up the hills with me, the hassle is downright painful but I know I need the discipline to do this.

I am scheming to take a road trip next month to L.A., my foundation, my roots.   I haven’t told him yet, but I plan on spending a good week with my yoga teacher, the first one, the one who reminded me I was a teacher, that I owned my own spiritual space and that space,  if extended, could hold others.  I haven’t taught a real yoga class in years.  And I miss it.  But first I must remember that this is my practice, my health, my medicine.  I have to find the discipline.  To get up and breath and sit and stretch.  

Discipline.

I never really liked that word.  But I get it now.  My friend—a yoga teacher—and I were chatting today.  We were talking about being disciplined.  And how it’s not about getting things done, or feeling the pressure to succeed or creating a force for your children to live under.   It’s about giving yourself gifts, planting seeds so you can harvest the life you long to live.  I realized the only discipline my kids need is to show them I have the disciplined to live healthy; happy and joyful, flexible and open.  I am disciplined to feel the bliss of right now.  In this moment of total middle of the night sleepless exhaustion.  I am writing and somehow I have crept out of the scary drowning sea of insomnia and I am living the moment in creative exploration,.  My words short, artless, messy, but at least I am hear.  Showing up.  Doing something.  

I am going to try to sleep now.  Maybe all I need to do was stop fighting the wakefulness.  Inviting insomnia in because insomnia needed a voice, a space to express.  Okay.  I can feel that, I see that.  Insomnia, you are welcome.  Do what you need to do with me.  I am going to try to sleep right now because tomorrow I have to be coherent to drive my children.  If you still need your space I will continue to write.  But really, I’d like to sleep now.

Goodnight.

An hour later.

The veil at night is thin.  It’s spooky.  It just gets darker and darker and in between those cracks I can see things that aren’t suppose to be there; messy, static, ghost-like things.  Blurs of whites and blacks and shapes.  I smell things.  Like my grandmother’s perfume and my mother’s hand cream and dark beef broth with limes and roses and the smell of my grandfather’s hair, a minty greasy smell.


* * *

Four days later and about a total of six hours of sleep.  Except for last night.  The herbs finally kicked in.  Chinese herbs hand rolled by a Tibetan Medicine Man that was in town.  I take three at night, they make me shudder with their potency.  i take the ones at night with a dropper of whiskey. makers mark.  yum.   I sleep like a baby.

I don’t know what they are but they smell like frankincense and roses.  i feel like i am chewing up powdered essential oils, the petals of flowers, musky bark ground down to a healing essence. I pop them in, small little round pellets and I crunch them up and then I wash them down with a bit (and a bit more) of whiskey.  I don’t drink whiskey really, but I think I might start.  B says it turns him on that I do a shot of whiskey before bed.  I kind of like it, too.


* * *

We are moving.  Again.  Not really by choice.  But the days have been long and hard and to be in the country means to stay in the country, not drive into the city for school and food and work.  .  I am a community person, my dharma is to bring people together, to see them daily, to converse with them and connect with them.  Solitude is not serving us.  Otherwise I suppose we would have made this place work, the back breaking mortgage and what not.

Whatever I say is all bullshit.  I am sad.  I want to keep my home.  But I go with this flow, because to fight it only hurts.  There is blessings in everything.  i am quite sure of that.  lately i have to keep reminding myself of that.  things have been a whirlwind, a massive blast of creatively and destruction, just like all of life, i seem to keep the paradox theme alive.  In each creation something dies.  Whenever something dies, something is brought to life. amen.