'Cuz getting up is hard to do

Darling C. has a hard time getting up in the morning, and I often have to wake her to get her dressed and off to daycare. We're arriving later and later as the days go on, and I keep trying to bargain with her to keep us on schedule: skip a middle of the night snack and just wake up and hour earlier, won't you? So far I've gotten no response.

I used to have a lot to say about a lot of things, and I imagine someday I will again return to the world of the conversant. For now, however, in addition to the thrilling topics of breastfeeding and poop, I spend a lot of time talking and thinking about sleep. How is the baby sleeping? people want to know. Does she sleep through the night yet? The answer, not unlike the color and amount of poop or the amount of breastmilk I'm able to extract from myself each day, changes constantly, and I'm never sure exactly what to say. I assume people are just asking out of general social politeness--how is the weather? I love your hair. Does the baby sleep?--and I accordingly don't want to get into some long-winded discussion of the ups and downs of darling C's (and thus my) sleeping habits. News flash: no one really cares how my kid sleeps. Or, if they do, it's in a comparitive way: her baby sleeps more/less than mine does/did. It's like benchmarking. You who ask most likely want a quick answer: she sleeps well or holy shit the kid never sleeps! For the most part, I oblige. But every once in a while I tire of my mommy-dom and, in search of real adult conversation with real adults, I launch into a long explanation of sleep, its pros and cons and its elusiveness. For those of you who have been stuck on the receiving end of my lectures hoping to god I'll shut up soon, I apologize. For those of you who can't get enough, buckle up and here we go.

A far-away friend of mine told me the other day that since she was the first among her friends to have a kid she thought the work of being a mom in the early days of her daughter's life was to be either feeding the girl or trying to put her back to sleep. I, on the other hand, spent the first few weeks wondering why darling C. wouldn't wake up. I'd wonder if there was something wrong with her as I loomed over the Pack n Play or carted her sleeping little self around, hoping some noise would rouse her and we could continue to get to know one another. Remember, ye who smirk, that this was my first time! I know I should have been taking her to movies, throwing dinner parties, cleaning my house and launching my own PR firm before she woke up and became the active little babe she is today, but I didn't know any better. If only, if only...

Anyway, we spent most of my maternity leave falling into little napping and sleeping patterns and then falling right out of them once I actually noticed the pattern and started to silently depend on those few minutes at 4 when I could get some email done or the hour at 11 when I could do laundry. When I reluctantly dragged her to daycare the first week, Clementine discovered a schedule, started going down for the night at 8 and I thought I had discovered a panacea for all our problems. Of course it didn't last.

These days, she goes to bed anytime between 8:30 and 10 on a good night, and this is working pretty well for us. We get to have a little extra time to see and play with her (it totally sucked when she was conking out at 8 because we had only 3 hours with her a day--my whole problem with working was that my kid wouldn't ever know us), but we still have time to do some stuff after she goes down. Granted, the "stuff" isn't always fun unless you count bill-paying, incessant laundry and catching up on obligatory correspondence fun, in which case this time is a laugh riot. OK, so my kitchen is so gross I hardly want to eat in it, and there are dust bunnies the size of alligators on my stairs, but for the most part we are getting stuff done.

So what's the bitch? Well, and I feel sheepish saying it with such surprise, I'm TIRED. It's a tired that is worse than pregnant tired, worse than illness tired, worse than any other tired I've ever felt. I have been falling asleep on conference calls and nodding off at my desk. There are times when I'm driving that I feel myself start to drift. Seriously, I feel like I'm a danger.

But what really gets me is that I've lived on much less sleep in the past. There were days I could be out until 3 a.m. and still make it to work bright-eyed at 8. I could stay up for 24 hours at a time and still feel lucid. Hell, lots of these late nights made me even more focused the next day (am I starting to sound like a drunk who says she drives better after a drink??). Some of these late nights were just before I had Clementine, so it can't be age...can it? Wait, don't answer that. Maybe it's just some tremendous hormonal shift that came with prenancy--in addition to fucking with all my other body parts and functions, it also prevents me from ever having a normal relationship to sleep ever again.

Whatever the cause, it's getting harder and harder to pry myself out of bed in the morning, especially with that sweet little girl nestled up beside me. Is this what the next 18 years will be like? I know she'll eventually sleep more and maybe even in her own bed (although I'm not eager for that, as I feel like it's the most time I have with her while I work), but there will be glasses of water to fetch and nightmares to soothe and illnesses to cure and broken curfews to monitor. And there will always, always be this whole cramming what I used to be able to do in the 6 hours after work into 2-3 hours between her bedtime and mine. OK this is depressing me just thinking about it. I feel like my life is becoming a bastardized version of a Slaughter song (on how many levels is that a bad thing?): Up All Night, Sleep Up All Day.