Okay, well there’s no cat here, but if you took the cat off the bed and put 2 pugs in you’d have it. Or rather if you took the woman out of bed and tucked her into a big, oversized recliner, removed the cat and tucked in a couple of pugs you’d have a picture of my house. But she looks pretty much exactly how I felt at 3:30 a.m., the eyes and all.

Actually I have been doing better at night since I stopped watching the news before bed. I have been reading at bedtime and doing really well. I have still been waking up most nights a time or two to go potty but then haven’t had too much trouble going back to sleep. When I have a hard time just turning on the light and reading for 15 or 20 minutes seems to help my brain switch gears and then I start to get sleepy and go back to sleep. Most nights it seems to be working.

Okay, full disclosure, there are nights that I fiddle on my phone instead but that has only started happening again since the book I was reading, a new mystery series which I liked okay in the first 70 pages or so, kind of soured for me. I decided I didn’t care for it and wasn’t going to finish it. As I don’t go back to the library until Tuesday I have run out of my cozy mysteries. That’s what I like to read at bedtime. This latest one just wasn’t cozy enough for me!

Then there was last night, and the big problem is that it was the night before a “Spa Day,” which is what I call the one day a month I take the pugs to the vet wherein they get their bath, ears cleaned and nails clipped. I can’t do the nails myself and they only charge $5 more to do the ears and the bath and they really give them a good once over. Today they found that Pugsley has an ear infection in one ear and we came home with the ear well cleaned out and the first dose of medicine already in the ear. It’s a good thing to do, these Spa Days, but, they decided a year ago, after years of me taking the dogs in around 11, that NOW you had to bring them in at 7:30 a.m. and make no mistake about it! We are simply not up then, but one day a month we have to be. We have to be up at 7 so I can get them out, feed them, give Pugsley his medication, get dressed, etc.

And here’s the thing, when you wake up at 3:30 and can’t go back to sleep you can usually relax about it a tad if you don’t have to get up early the next morning. On the night before a spa day here’s what happens. I wake up and go potty and settle back in with the dogs. They sleep happily through anything. Me, not so much. I try for 30 minutes to go back to sleep, I start to get uncomfortable, and then anxious, and then desperate. Now it’s 4:00. I pick up my phone, not bothering to turn on the light, and start fiddling about, checking email, and checking Facebook.  I notice at least 2 friends who have been posting between 3 and 4 am. I am not alone. And then I think of something I want to tell a dear friend so figure I’ll just leave her a message for when she wakes up. PING! She answered me! Now it is 4:15, 4:30, and she said she was up for the day! I answered her but I said, somewhat desperately, “I HAVE TO GO BACK TO SLEEP.” And I tried, God knows I tried. But I kept peeking at the clock. 5:00, after 5, and the alarm was going to go off at 7.

Finally somewhere along the line I did doze. When I woke up a little at 6:20 I thanked God that I didn’t have to get up yet. At 6:40 I was grateful to have 20 more minutes. But there was a creeping sense of desperation underneath it all. I had barely slept from 3:30 until 7.

There is a certain kind of madness that creeps in when you open your eyes, feeling like you must have been asleep for HOURS, having turned off the light, say, about midnight, only to find that it is only 2:00. Then a kind of bargaining happens, “I don’t have to go to the bathroom, I DON’T have to go to the bathroom, I don’t have to go to the bathroom, OH PLEASE GOD LET ME GO BACK TO SLEEP…” And, amazingly, you do, but by 3 or 3:30 the jig is up. If you don’t get up and pee your bladder will start to sing arias and right about that time a pug will decide to re-settle himself and do so right on top of your bladder. Light on, shuffle the pugs, get up. And then you come back to whatever “bed” might be for you and you look just exactly like the lady in the picture at the top. Or at least I do, and so do a lot of other women I know.

My dear friend Noni told me that a week or so ago she woke up around 3, couldn’t go back to sleep, and finally got up at 4 and got in the shower to start her day. The friend who messaged me at 4:15 this morning was doing just that. But I just can’t get up at 3 or 4 and start my day. First off the pugs just wouldn’t have it. You should see them when I have to wake them up at 7:00, they kind of move slightly, open one eye and stare at me like, “Surely you jest.” I have seriously had a hard time getting them up and out to the potty and on some occasions they didn’t even want to eat that early which might be a full 2 to 3 hours earlier than usual. I can’t imagine what they’d do if I got up for the day at 4 a.m.? So I try, and I struggle, and I suffer, and I bargain with God, and I ask the angels for help. I try to read, I go on Facebook, I feel comforted when I see other women I know posting on Facebook in the weesmas but I don’t do that. Except for messaging my friend at 4 because it was important to me that she got the message, I don’t have the energy or wherewithal to engage with people as I meander about the web at night, I read stuff. I look at the notifications on my page, amble about, and finally go back to sleep. But I absolutely love that I see Noni posting, and a few days ago Noni posted something and Noni’s mother, who is in her 80’s, commented on her post. In her 80’s! Does it never get better? Am I, are we, henceforth doomed to nights with only spotty sleep?

Now I am really tired. Not having really slept since 3:30, up for the day at 7, and pretty busy since then it is now after 2 and I am feeling it. The thing is that I used to be able to nap during the day but not so much anymore. I will snuggle up with the pugs in our big chair, read until I feel sleepy, and then put my black silk sleep mask on and “rest.” I might kind of doze, once in a blue moon I do fall asleep for a little bit, but not for long. Maybe I will get a wee nap in today.

One thing did make me laugh though. Jenny Lawson, whose hysterical books on mental health that I love, said on her Facebook page the other day that insomnia was “her boyfriend.” I nearly spit my coffee all over the computer screen when I read that I laughed so hard. Maybe you have to have mental health issues like Jenny and I to appreciate it, but I thought it was just hysterical.

I have written, not too long ago, about trying to make friends with my changing Circadian rhythms but screw that! I don’t want to make friends with being awake from 3 a.m. on with maybe, on a good night, a scant snooze after that. I want to go to sleep and stay asleep. I will not go down without a fight. I will not give up. So I am asking all of you out there, what do you do when you can’t sleep in the middle of the night? Do you have techniques that get you back to sleep? Do you give up and get up? I really want to know. Please share anything that you can in the comments below. Throw me a bone. Help a sister out. Seriously. I mean seriously. I’m tired of counting sheep.

The Experiment ~A 365 Day Search For Truth, Beauty &
Happiness: Day 1 ~ Introduction To The Project
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
Yoda

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