A MEDITATION ON SLEEPLESSNESS
Within light there is darkness, but do not try to understand that darkness.
Within darkness there is light, but do not look for that light.
Light and darkness are a pair like the foot before and the foot behind in walking.
—Sekito Kisen, “The Identity of Relative and Absolute”
I could have endured all of this, and still more. I could have plodded on through the zombie days. I could have rolled with the punches and blown with the breeze. I could have mastered the moves and gotten good at it, but in all the commotion, we suffered one last catastrophe—a home invasion.
A thief came in the darkness, into our private sanctuary, into our haven of rest and nest of dreams, and stole the night.
My pregnancy guidebooks didn’t have a chapter on this. The doctor didn’t bring it up. None of the well-meaning relatives and neighbors, none of the Good Samaritans and gift givers, no nurse, no friend, no stranger, no one ever took me aside in loving confidence and comradeship and whispered a word of the truth. So here it is, for your sake.
When you have a baby, the boundaries of a day are not boundaries at all. What you thought was a day—daylight followed by an evening meal and assorted frivolities—is only one-half of the day. A true day goes on much longer! A true day is a night and a day and a night again. A true day never ends. And you will be awake to see it, because sleep is not a given, it is not a law, it is not yours.
There.
So you lose a good bit of your precious sleep. But the most devastating loss is not the loss of sleep, it is the loss of what you thought was yours.
What’s the big deal, you might wonder, in a world that treats sleep deprivation like a sport. Who isn’t sleep deprived? I, too, had insomnia in pitiful little fits before motherhood. After one breakup I forgot how to sleep for nearly three months. I was seriously sleep disordered, but the disorder was mine, and I put up the good fight before letting it go.
Sleep is one of our most intractable attachments. We claw and clutch and crave it. We adorn and worship it. We four-hundred-thread count it. It is our one sovereign domain. We hide out there; we fantasize and burrow there; we think we can’t live without it. You will see that you can live without it—just enough.
Between a mother and a child, sleeplessness unfurls like a torture device. Who will crack? Who will break? Blessedly, you will. You will give up and go forth to the cries. You will let go of your resistance, your willful inertia. You will drop the dead weight of your needs so you can gather up your child to feed, succor, and sleep. You will break with your greedy, sleepy, clandestine self. Yes, you will do it every time. This is your new spiritual practice: waking up and getting out of bed. Over many nights of practice flinging back the covers and tearing loose from your attachment, deep wisdom will emerge. Everything, it seems, comes out of the night, and you are now its most alert and dependable eyewitness.
You are a witness to biology. The first months are the most simple to explain and the most difficult to endure. Sleep in newborns is a function of the stomach. Fill the stomach and sleep comes. Empty the stomach and sleep goes. It is not a matter, yet, of anything that anyone can convince you that you have mismanaged. But you will scarcely sleep in between. It is important that you place no more expectations on yourself during this period than the world expects of you. And the world expects nothing of you except to stay home, feed your child, and steal whatever sleep you can.
You will make it; you will make it to that one day soon when your child grows past the digestive tipping point and can consume enough to occupy his body for a full seven hours. This seven hours—this Magnificent Seven—is called “sleeping through the night.” It is only called sleeping through the night, because to the parent of any one-, two-, three-, four-, or five-year-old, sleeping through the night is something that you say with great frequency but that occurs only intermittently. Everything comes out of the night, and you are the eyewitness.
You are a witness to neurology. At about eight months, the nature of sleep in your child will change. The center of sleep somehow shifts from the stomach to the brain, and your baby now sleeps in patterns just like you do: off to sleep, then—hello!—awake; off to sleep, then awake again. With our daughter, this was a period that found us latched to our computers, searching madly and suckered hopelessly into every come-on guaranteed to put a kid to sleep and keep her there: videos, CDs, books, creams, lotions, teddy bears, teas, and aromatherapies. We let all of these hucksters accuse us, and we paid their price, believing that we had somehow failed to properly train our child to sleep without waking.
You will make it; you will make it to that one day soon when your child stirs and turns and gently puts himself back to sleep. But there will be other kinds of nights that are not so gentle. Everything comes out of the night, and you are the eyewitness.
You are a witness to the predation of sickness. Fevers rise and crest at night. Coughs thicken and choke. Viruses take root and rampage. Night is your vigil, to wait and hold and comfort with nothing, usually nothing, except your steadfast presence and silent faith that daylight comes and all things pass.
You will make it; you will make it to that one healthy day soon when the only thing you are nursing is a nightmare. Everything comes out of the night, and you are the eyewitness. You are a witness to fears when they take shape and find a name in your child’s shadowy world. When only mom can subdue monsters and scare away spirits, when you and only you can restore peace and sweetness to the dreams beneath your child’s lowered lids.
There is so much to see in the faint light of these nights. There is so much to learn about you, your child, and being human. There is the length of each night’s darkness, unstirred by time or motion, filled by unseen force, traversed by the miraculous and unknowable connection between you and your child. Night after night you will wake to its pulse. You shiver, and she stirs. You worry, and she cries. You watch, and she is carried and cushioned by the invisible weight of your watching. You will be amazed at your capacity; you will be astounded by your power to respond and do anything, and your power to be still and do nothing. Everything comes out of the night, the infinity of days and nights, the vastness of things known and unknown, and you are now invited to witness it all.
The invitation comes at first several times a night. Then nightly. Then by twos and threes and then every time you need it most. The invitation is to enter eternity, with your child, with everything, into the silence of intimate stillness. To sit and to rock, to be patient and present, to be quick and compassionate, to soothe the ruffles and cool the brow, to see without seeking, to witness without ever knowing how or understanding why light follows darkness and darkness follows light.