Between the Midnight and the Morning

Insomnia comes calling.

Get Finished Flowering (1870), Gabriel von Max

Our boy mostly sleeps through the night, now, at fifteen months. But today I am holding him in my arms in the dark as it turns four in the morning, rocking back and forth in the nursery chair on its castors. He has a cold, and has woken several times. My husband took the first half of the night, and I am taking the second. In theory this way each of us gets some rest. In practice I am relieved when it is my turn because I can give up on sleeping at all.

Mostly my troubles with sleep involve waking in the early hours, usually somewhere around three, and bristling through an hour or more until I finally fall asleep over the dim glow of my Kindle. Less frequently comes slinking in a purist's insomnia, the can't-fall-asleep-don't-go-to-sleep kind, the kind that makes you glad for the arrival of four a.m., because you can count that as morning, at least, and make an attempt at the day.

Insomnia is like snow: quite tolerable for a couple of days or so, if you've nowhere to go and nothing to do, the mere fact of it dazzling despite its inconvenience. Look: how suddenly, how effortlessly, the familiar is transformed! Any longer, however, and accommodations have to be made, and it all becomes quite tedious; and woe betide those whose plans always involved leaving the house, or arriving on time. That is to say: there have been occasions upon which the advent of the all-night insomnia has been less of a trial: summer holidays when I was teaching, yes, and the early days of working for myself, before I had my son, and could sleep in later if I needed, work into the evening instead.

Oh, it starts innocuously enough, doesn't it? An alertness upon retiring to bed that I assume a few minutes reading, swaddled in blankets, will ease (to my book-loving heart's eternal chagrin, I can usually only manage a few pages in bed before I am dozing). But: I read on, and on, my sensible early bedtime made moot. Reading all night would perhaps be a happier way to address the problem, but inevitably after a few hours I am increasingly consumed with thoughts about how difficult it is going to be to function the next day. A clock starts to tick. I make swift calculations: if I fell asleep right now, that'd be X number of hours. Invariably, as X dwindles, my frustration and anxiety increase. I am going to be so tired, I think, pointlessly, and seethe at my body's treachery. How can you do this to me? But my anger is misdirected. For my body merely follows where my mind goes, and, as I lay down my book and make a concerted effort to get to sleep, my thoughts only quicken like minnows.

I'm all sped up: those emails I must reply to tumbles into I did not reply to that WhatsApp voicemail tumbles into do I ever make enough effort with the people I care about, and do they know how much I do care, and is trying imperfectly ever enough and what it is to make a meaningful life? The thoughts balloon into each other, bloating until their origins are unrecognisable: here I am as a child in school, waving my hands back and forth at my sides as we sing, glimpsing in my periphery two sniggering boys who are pointing at my hands– which still move! stubborn! fish-like! – thinking why do I have to be so strange? and here I am as a student, drunk in a college bar, flinging those same careless hands as I talk at someone, convinced by the liquor of my wit and my worth, and here is my hand connecting with the bottle she raises to her lips, and here is her wincing with pain, her small freckled face pulling towards its centre. Here I am barely noticing, thinking nobody else notices either, thinking everyone else proceeds through the same smeary softness I do, learning the next day, bleary and sick, that I have chipped her tooth and she has seen an emergency dentist. Here I am, feeling defensive rather than sorry; here I am apologising stiffly or not at all, I can't remember–

how many days has it been since I last drank? a thousand?

Here I am drinking, angry, belligerent, arguing or crying, scuffing knees and shins and picking gravel out of grazed palms. Here I am an infant, tiny, round of face and of belly, drifting through an adult party in the mid-eighties, my parents' divorce not yet filed, our childhood home not yet emptied of my mother – here I am knowing my father is changed somehow, watching his oblivious hand pour and keep pouring wine over the rim of a glass so that it splashes onto the miniature plastic table my sister and I sit at to draw. Here I am newly afraid–

What time is it? Gone one in the morning, gone two – and though I tell myself I might sleep yet, I know I won't. I have passed a threshold, and all that's left to do is to hold on through the worst of it. Attempts to read now are in vain: I try to concentrate on the words on the page, but the starts of thoughts and more thoughts all sharpen into points. Each word I read serves to fuel them, a wolfish chorus of narrative and memory that twists and warps like something caught on barbed wire. I tell myself that there's a singular horror to these early hours. What is it Ray Bradbury said? You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying, at three in the morn. Yes: few things seem as bleak once the sun rises. Well – I know this in my mind but not in my body, and so the dread remains.

So: four in the morning and I am saved by my son. His body nestles into mine and I feel his solid warmth as I rock him in the dark. Whenever I hold him like this I think about my breathing, recall the meditations I do so often these days, remember to loosen my jaw behind my closed lips and bring down my shoulders from about my ears. I breathe into my belly so that it rises underneath his weight and I exhale for a long time. I wonder if as I slow, he slows, if it helps him to soften back into sleep. I wonder if any trace of that physical connection forged in pregnancy – his heart beating inside my body, my heartbeat his ever-constant backdrop – is recalled in these moments we sit with our hearts once again so close to one another. Do our bodies remember?

After a time I place him back in his cot where he sleeps on his front, his butt piked up in the air as is his wont. I wait there in the dark for a while, listening to the steady sound of his breath.

By the time I come creeping to the coffee-maker, to my desk, I am calm. The fatigue that will follow is yet but a mere flicker about the horizon: later, it will feel as if my face could slide right off, like a wet and dragging cloak, but for now there's only the vaguest taste of metal in my mouth, the slightest sense of hollowing out. Now, I feel almost cocky, almost smug. There's a satisfaction to it: the night's tussle is over, and I have emerged if not as glorious victor then at least upright and approaching coherence. It might be perspective that solidifies as my muscles warm and the minutes click over into what constitutes morning by anybody's books. Certainly, there's a return to standard operating procedure. The horrors retreat, and I recall the worst of the night's hours as one does the worst kind of pain: academically and without physical connection. In the daylight, all of those thoughts and those through-lines, the writhing tumble of them, are if not benign then at least humbled and easier to hush. If there's a suspicion that what this is is not so much perspective as it is a necessary sort of forgetting, I shelve it quietly and without fuss.

It's probably for the best: I have to proceed with optimism, where nighttimes are concerned. What else is there? Insomnia will return with all its sharpened teeth, of this I have no doubt. There'll be plenty of those blank and wretched hours to wade through, plenty of dormant things burrowing up, and out; plenty of things I thought dead and stinking raised from their graves. Until then, I think. Until then. I toast the morning with my coffee, and I wait for my son to wake.