My baby starts squealing like a dolphin right before she knows she has to go to bed. She plays with all her toys at once and tries to make as much noise as possible, raging at her activity center, as L says. I think she does this to hype herself up, literally to keep herself awake because she doesn’t want to go to sleep. But she needs sleep, we need sleep, we all need to sleep. But apparently we can’t all sleep at the same time.
A few months ago I was interviewed for a book about how people think. ‘High achievers’, specifically, but the bar didn’t seem too high because ‘doctor’ was enough of a qualification to fit that bill. It was fun because I have always loved thinking about thinking. Thinking about how I know when things are right, and when things are wrong. So imagine the terror I felt when I realized I had made a cognitive error.
One evening, I was making dinner when it occurred to me that I hadn’t put the sweet potatoes in the microwave before making the salad. Sweet potatoes take about eight minutes, so dinner would be delayed, waiting for the potatoes to be done! Maybe not a big deal to you, but it’s not something I would do. I pride myself on doing things in the most efficient order in the kitchen and in the OR, and suddenly I was…inefficient.
Hours later, I almost washed my body before using hair conditioner. In my teenage years, I decided that it doesn’t make any sense to use conditioner after you wash your body because you want to get that residue off. So I shampoo, conditioner, soap. Face last. Well, butt last.
But I digress. I was so tired, I was doing things out of order. I was making…errors. Small ones, but cognitive errors just the same. And I’m not one to be careless. There’s a line in a book I’ve been reading, ‘We Contain Multitudes’ by Sarah Henstra, where the brother is teaching the main character how to cook and he says, “Let’s not be those people who worry about the mess as we’re cooking.” It bothered me because I am a person who worries about the mess. So I clean up as I cook.
But again I digress. The problem is, mistakes you don’t realize till later. Errors you realize right away. Maybe a mistake is a missed error, but they add up. I am so tired, we are all so tired, that we need a break. My mind zoned out and when I came to, I found myself shredding chicken voraciously. Giving my mind a break. Doing something mindless. For a lot of people, it’s scrolling a phone. Doom scrolling is both a way of activating your brain and deactivating it. It keeps you awake when you should be asleep, but also keeps your brain so occupied that you don’t have to form a new thought.
We know from scientific research that sleeplessness is like being drunk. Accidents happen while driving when sleepy.
But what is making us so very tired? All the things we have to do. All the stuff going on in the world that we’re supposed to care about.
My point is that being tired, all of us being so very tired, is the root of all our problems. That, and constipation, of course. Not being able to poop makes everyone really grouchy. But what if the solution to most things in the world is that we all get a solid eight hours of sleep or a real vacation (no texts, no emails).
As humans, as a species, we’re tired! Tired of the grind, tired of the bullshit, tired of pretending. Tired of pretending to be someone, pretending to care, pretending not to. Tired of putting yourself out there, tired of being alone. Tired of looking a mess, and tired of putting on clothes. It shows in our driving, either with too much caution or with abandon. It shows in the way we interact with other people, or don’t. Being tired leads to mistakes, leads to complete and utter apathy, a devil-may-care, fuck-it-all attitude. I.Just.Want.To.Sleep. Somebody make the Supreme Court get some sleep. They’re making some cognitive errors.
We just need a mental break, before we have a mental breakdown.
Sleep is a mental break. TV is. Drinking is. Scrolling on a phone is. But also shutting off your phone, going outside, taking a walk. Meditating. Shredding chicken. But truly shutting off your brain. Maybe that’s why church works. Or prayer works. Or even really intense exercise? Maybe?
The funny thing is, we get used to the tired. We get used to the chaos. We maybe don’t perform our best anymore, but we are still doing what we can with what little we have left in the tank. Most days I wouldn’t change a damn thing at all.
A year ago I was two months pregnant and had been sleeping on an air mattress while we frantically packed up the rest of the apartment in New York City so that we could drive for two days down to Atlanta to see what was up. Less than three months later, L left for South Carolina for a work trip for a few days. It was the first time I’d been alone in this house; at that point, I was six months pregnant; we’d been dealing with cockroaches and the unbearable swamp of summer, and I didn’t know the neighborhood from Narnia.
Last week, L left for a conference for a few days, leaving me in this house for only the second time. Amazing what can happen in a year. My infant daughter is six months old and sleeping in the next room. We’ve spent all day playing, eating, napping, and reading books, staying inside because that unbearable swampiness is creeping back, along with the thumbnail-sized descendants of the thumb-sized cockroaches of yesteryear. But we know some of the neighbors now. Our neighbor to the right has brought our baby gifts and introduced us to her granddaughter. Our neighbor a few doors down frequently invites us to low-key dance parties in her backyard. I don’t feel any stares any more, nor do the Medlock Park Neighborhood Watch signs seem as ominous as when I first walked around the block. We’ve probably gone around a hundred times now- first noticing the leaves fall and the buds blooming back, then the ‘For sale’ signs going up and down, the New Baby balloons that appear on mailboxes every week, the power lines that sat on the road for the entirety of the winter and the work crew that just recently fixed them. There’s been lost dogs and cats, coyote and snake sightings, hawks circling lazily in the sky. The blackbird family, I think they’re called a rookery? Undulating to and from the lampposts to the trees. There’s even a few old ladies who greet us regularly, and a few metal goats whom we greet regularly. We even know how to tell drivers who stop and ask for directions how to get to the baseball fields in Medlock Park.
We (arbitrarily) say, “Give it six months.” Six months to get used to a new job, six months (at least) to settle into a new neighborhood, and apparently it takes six months to figure out how to live with a new baby. Kind of, we kind of have it figured out. We’ve all three showered two days in a row, I survived three days and three nights alone with the baby (okay, I had a few morning hours of nanny help), and she is not only alive, but, as L says, she is thriving. Every day I can’t believe she’s real. L says she’s the best thing I’ve ever made for her (and she’s seen my pottery). Seven days makes a habit, but six months makes a life.
So I guess we’ve settled in a little. The floors creak and the thermostat is bewilderingly inconsistent and I still don’t understand the mechanism behind these blinds. But we’ve got a few memories stored inside these four walls now, Halloween and Christmas and a New Years’ Eve baby and the revolving door of people who’ve come to see her, more visits than we’ve had with our families in the last twenty years. The garden is finally growing, zinnias outside and tomatoes on the porch, and we have some sense of a rhythm to our days again. Even the cats have new favorite spots to sleep, perched atop unopened moving boxes and lining our brand new white armchair with their hair. My family makes any house my home.
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Until next time, always go black tie.
If you haven’t already, check out my other blog, IMMO (In My Medical Opinion), where I post some of my very opinionated essays, some of which were published on Doximity but I realized that people who are not in healthcare and not subscribed to that platform can’t read them, so I’m reposting them here for free, in their original, unedited form, and in some cases, with an additional ‘Further reading’ list in case you’re interested.