I must have slept a little because I dream. But I have spent most of the night awake. C wakes and whines for the breast and I put it in her mouth and she sleeps again. And then sometime later wakes and whines, and so it goes, but I do not sleep. I slap around the edges, splashing in the shallows, but as I begin to sink, wham! A bolt of lightning bursts through me and I’m buzzed awake.
Like I am awake now. It is past dawn. I am sure I heard the birds. First one, then many, then one again. I have been living somewhere beautiful, somewhere full of green and ocean spray. I write in the early mornings and feel the dawn move through my body. C runs like a shadow through a house made of wood and bone. I have finally found my feet.
Something is tapping on the edge of my consciousness. Am I asleep? I could be. No, well, but I did dream. I dreamt I was stuck in a house and couldn’t get out. Or is that what’s happening now? Something is occurring to me, something that needs my attention. What is it?
I have coffee. The day seeps into me, and I slowly come to.I feel a flush of fear. Was that real? The world tilts.
I send a message to my therapist. You need to sleep, she responds. No session, no work, no C. Sleep. Now.
Er, okay, I respond.
I try. I lie under a tree, but each time I come to sleep I am buzzed awake. I will die, I realise. How long has it been? Days, weeks. If I can’t sleep I will have to give up breastfeeding to go onto sleeping pills. But C hasn’t taken the bottle. How will she drink? And what about the nights? Her love of the breast. I can’t do that. But if I don’t sleep I’ll die. But I can’t take anything to sleep. I go round and round.
This has happened before. Between the two pregnancies I did not sleep without chemical aids for four months. It started on New Year’s eve. I took my mother-in-law’s benzos until I fell pregnant. I even delayed taking a pregnancy test because I knew that when I knew for sure I’d have to stop the medication and I was so afraid of not sleeping – it’s funny how we delude ourselves.
I take homeopathic remedies that do nothing but leave powdery trails and piss me off. I go to a BodyTalk therapist who tells me Covid restrictions were worse than the concentration camps. I say, Um. I box breathe, and count breaths and do the humming bird breath. I listen to yoga nidra sessions. I shimmer half in, half out, as C twists and moans and feeds and sleeps, slipping, again and again into that other life, where I am alone and utterly myself.
What do I want? What do I like? I don’t know. I know what my partner likes, and I use him as a proxy for myself and then get to feel both marvellously selfless and full of resentment. What music do I want to listen to? I don’t know. Where I should be there is a blank. There’s nothing there. What foods do I like? I begin to pause, to honestly ask myself what I want? What do I want? I don’t know.
It annoys Ricky no end. I say, I’m going to be annoying for a while while I try to work this out. He says he’s going to get annoyed for a while because it’s very annoying. That’s fair enough, I reply. We shake on it.
One day he is leaving to run some errands. Should he take C? I can’t decide. I know what he would want – not to take her, to be light-footed and swift – but I don’t know what I would want. I go to the toilet, hold, hold, close my eyes, ask, what do I want now? And wait, wait for an answer from the deepest parts of me, from my stomach. I ask and ask and panic. Blank, blank, nothing. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know who I am. I breathe. What do I want? I hold open. I hold. Hold. Then, very, very faintly I hear: rest. What?! No, man, rest… what? The options are: write, clean the house, go with to do the shopping. But, yes, undeniably, it is rest.
I send C with Ricky, make tea and go into the garden. How does one rest? I don’t know. It was not sleep that was asked for; it was rest. I sit down. I have no phone, no book. I am not meditating. I am… doing nothing. I sit, sip, sit. There are birds. The palm leaves jerk and jiggle as a weaver pulls lengths of it for a nest. My nasturtiums receive a bee. Suddenly I well up. Oh, oh. I laugh. Oh, the world is right here. It’s already right here. I just need to stop and receive it, receive myself, who is also waiting just below the level of my own frantic need for numbness and control. I am awake!
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