Sleepy?

I’ve been thinking about sleep. I have two grown children with diametrically opposed ideas about sleep, as they always did have. My boy child–now a man–has always said, “Sleep is a waste of time.” My girl child–now a mother of two–has always declared that “Sleep is sacred.” For her, I’m sure, now more than ever.

For most of my years, I gave it little thought, I’m sure. Aside from being curious about it; I do remember wondering philosophically about sleep in general. The whole have to sleep to restore and renew thing. It felt like a design flaw sometimes. Other times it seemed like a great idea. But I rarely pondered my personal need for sleep. I went to bed when I was sleepy–usually pretty late; I was what was referred to as a ‘night owl’. I got up when I woke up, for many years to the sounds of an alarm, I’ll admit, because it was “time” to start the day: kids to school, me to work, and so forth. My husband always seemed to have an internal clock and got up cheerful and talkative, while my son and I were slower to get started and less engaged. My daughter was hard to get out of bed.

After we moved to High Springs, five years ago this summer, I began to want to stay up later and get up earlier. The getting up part I blamed on the dog wanting to go for our walk, and I suppose it became a habit to get up with the dawn for the most part.

The going-to-bed part I have come to think of as surrendering. I take some medication for a seizure condition, and it slows down my nervous system, so within an hour of taking it, I’m feeling drowsy. Not so much so that I HAVE to go to bed, but just mellower and less inclined to fight going to bed unless there’s something I really want to do, like write. When I do surrender, I sleep well except for the nightly trips to the bathroom to empty my bladder, sometimes several of them. I keep telling myself to stop drinking liquid earlier in the day, and I keep not listening to myself. Funny, I never resent those trips. I think I relish the idea of waking up–for any reason.

My husband loves to sleep. He goes to bed, usually before I do, most of the time an hour or two before I do. And he gets up later than I do. I think of those hours as my alone time, and I like having some of that.

I’m thinking of sleep these days as time when I’m not alive. I’m living, of course, but not alive. I’m alive when I’m awake. It’s not hard to figure out: I’m coming to the end of my life and want to have as much time as I can steal to be alive, awake, productive, contributing, learning, communicating, and feeling. So, I’ve come around to my son’s way of looking at it: a waste of time.

My mother said once that I always fought sleep. I have no memory of that, but I believe her. Maybe I was destined to come to this conclusion. Maybe I’m trying to steal time and stockpile it, even though my logical brain knows how ludicrous that is. Maybe I just want to be alive until I’m not, and as long as my eyes are open … well, you get it, I’m sure.

It’s just me, again, pondering life’s mysteries and offering my take on them. Today it’s sleep. Tomorrow, who knows?