Sleep, Glorious Sleep

"The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more."
-Wilson Mizener

Sleep, how miss your regular presence in my life. I thought that my sleep deprived nights were over when the babies grew up. Unfortunately, my timing was off and by the time my kids stopped having nightmares, I had entered the next phase of my life: peri-menopause.

Sleep now eludes me on a regular basis. I yawn and struggle to stay awake all evening. I draw the drapes, darken the room and slide between the soft, clean sheets. I may doze off for 20 minutes and then I am awakened.

I am boiling hot, I am freezing cold. My arm aches. My brain races. If I am lucky, I can calm my mind and relax my body to fall asleep until the cycle repeats itself again.

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I would be a teenager again for one reason, to sleep like one. The teens in my household average 8-11 hours of sleep a night; deep, coma-like sleep.

The other morning I asked my son if he had heard the tremendous cat fight that took place under our respective bedroom windows.
His response? "What fight? I never heard a thing."

Now days my husband and I measure a good night's sleep by the number of times we wake up. It's extremely rare to sleep through the night with no interruptions.

My older son was home for a few weeks and complained one morning that he had to get up and use the restroom the night before. It had, according to him, "taken me a half hour to fall back to sleep."

I raised my coffee cup and toasted him. It's all downhill from here.

Dreams

I had a hard time falling asleep last night. I tossed and turned for quite some time before deciding to give up and read. My mind was churning with so many things, if only I could set my brain on "sleep mode" like I do my computer.

Early this morning I fell into a very deep sleep and had one of those dreams that seem to last for hours. I won't bore you with the details, but the overriding theme seemed to be "hello and goodbye."

This made perfect sense to me; the day had been filled with news of changes coming to the lives of family and friends.

At the end of the dream I turned around at the sound of my name, and my good friend Tammy was walking towards me. She was moving back to her hometown in Ohio. As we embraced she whispered in my ear, "you can do anything you set your mind to."

Dreams are funny that way; often just entertaining us during sleep like a mindless t.v. show, and then suddenly, a real message tucked between all that nonsense.

Tammy gave me the words I most needed to hear yesterday; there's still time to re-invent myself yet again. That's what transition is all about.