Our second day of Mother Words essays by Laura Blackmar Tompkins…

I look like I got in a fight. I feel like I got in a fight, too. And lost.

At least the black around my eyes is mostly just yesterday’s mascara, combined with some dark circles and puffiness from hours of wakefulness last night. Better than actual bruises. I dab makeup remover on the dark smudges, slowly beginning the process of putting myself back together. I smooth the hair that started to form dreadlocks from tossing and turning.

Good enough, at least, to leave the house in search of coffee.

For a while motherhood had cured me of insomnia, replacing it with the constant sleep deprivation of the newborn period. During those months of round-the-clock breastfeeding, my eyes closed the second my head hit the pillow. And that stage was followed by the current stage of intermittent bad dreams and minor illnesses that still keep me from taking sleep for granted.

Even now, though, insomnia is creeping back into my life, an old acquaintance I’d rather not run into again. (“Hey,” I smile thinly, trying fake politeness, “It’s you. Just in town for a few days? No? You’re moving in? I see. Huh.”)

My daughter seems to have inherited my sleeping patterns. A stressful event, a vacation, any disruption in routine usually results in multiple trips to the bathroom or “scary dreams” at night.

As an infant and toddler, before she could hop out of bed and sprint upstairs to our room, she sobbed in her crib whenever she woke. Which was usually anywhere from three times a night to a number so high my exhausted brain lost count. This went on until shortly before her brother was born, when things seemed to stabilize for a brief but glorious moment before his arrival disrupted life and she went right back to waking up at odd intervals to make sure we were still around.

I still know the exact pattern of lunging steps necessary to make it out of her room quietly, avoiding the creakiest floorboards.

The nights have gotten better as she’s gotten older; talking through her anxieties seems to help, as does bribery. But she still goes from lightly asleep to wide-awake and agitated at the slightest disturbance. We maintain the habits that got us this far: no flushing the toilet at night in the bathroom next to her room, and never, under any circumstances, opening her door or going in to check on her. (Our small house makes it easy to hear any sound at night, and we use a monitor if we need it.)

Last night, though, I threw caution aside and opened her door twice.

Earlier that day, she fell on the playground. Headfirst, off a high platform. It was exactly like the waking nightmares that have fueled my insomnia since I became a parent, but real this time and exponentially more terrifying. My first thought: relief – she was crying, which meant she was alive and conscious. I ran to her and was amazed to find that a mouthful of sand seemed to be her biggest discomfort. She was playing happily again within minutes, while my heart didn’t stop its frantic pounding for hours.

I observed her closely afterward and she seemed perfectly fine. But later that night, I kept noticing every detail in our house with a heightened awareness, a nagging sense of how different those ordinary objects would look to me if she had not come home from the park perfectly fine. Her brand-new ballet shoes, sitting on the dining table instead of in her closet where they should be, with their stiff, untied laces standing straight up like antennae. The swimming registration form where she had scrawled her name and the name of her best friend in bright green crayon over my writing.

When I came downstairs at 2:00 a.m. to escape the replay of her fall endlessly looping through my brain, these things made my throat ache. I went to her room and quietly opened the door, watched for a minute as she slept, beautifully, on her side.

I tiptoed away and drank a glass of water, made a list, read for a while. All the usual strategies for working my way back toward sleep. When they didn’t help, I went back to her door and stood listening. I opened the door again, as quietly as I could. This time, her eyes flew open.

“Mama?” She didn’t sit up, but reached out her arms to me. I lay down, hugging her, inhaling the scent of strawberry shampoo and crisp outside air. And beneath those, the scent that is just her, that I’ve been smelling since she was a wide-awake baby who wanted nothing more than to be nestled in my arms all night. She sighed sleepily. “Mama? . . . I like your nightgown.” Finally, I felt ready to go back to sleep. 

Laura Blackmar Tompkins is a 29-year-old mother of two living in South Minneapolis. She blogs about motherhood at Cat Named Pig

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 9:45 am and is filed under Guest Bloggers, Mother Words Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.