The search for sleep

The trouble with sleep starts with trying to get the two-year-old to go to sleep. The long evenings have confused her. She remains unconvinced that bedtime is in fact bedtime since it’s now still bright outside.

 

I tell her that in the summer the days are longer and when she asks why, I attempt to explain about the earth’s axis having a tilt and us all living on a giant globe spinning around a gas ball but she remains sceptical and sighs and says, but why is the sun bigger and I say, well it just is in summer, now lie down and go to sleep. 

 

Sing me a song, she orders and I warble a few lullabies, trying and failing to make my voice sonorous and sleep inducing instead of croaky and hoarse. I try to remember the tune of Hush-a-Bye-Baby and think how different it must be to be the child of someone like Adele and get sung beautifully to sleep each night.

 

I wonder why the words in Hush-a-bye-baby are so vicious, what with the branch breaking and the baby in the song plunging out of the tree. Did some tired parents from long ago, driven demented by sleep deprivation, make up these strange words to go with the soft tune out of sheer frustration?

 

Eventually, as soon as her subconscious knows I’ve missed the beginning, middle and end of Corrie, she falls asleep and I stagger up and pretend to have an evening before staggering to bed. Some nights, some beautiful wonderful nights that’s it, we all sleep in our own beds and wake up the next morning refreshed.

 

But most nights, the pitter-patter of tiny feet charge into the room, leap on the bed and burrow in between the two adults. Some nights that is all; we sleep, crowded together and wake in the morning slightly squashed and crumpled.

 

And then there are the other nights, the nights of tiny feet kicking off the quilts, of small hands flinging through the darkness and connecting with grown up noses, of despair and praying for sleep, of mornings with eyes like dry desert lakes.

 

This, I think, is why coffee was invented.