breaking boughs

Not unlike peanut allergies, I find people’s challenges with sleep to be more apparent now then ever before in my adult life – roughly 20 years for those following along at home. The classic child rearing sleep issues are lamented every second of every day at a water cooler, Starbucks or play date near you. But I bet these literally tired discussions existed forever and will continue to afford new mothers and fathers the opportunity to compare lack of sleeping stories and bask in each other’s somnambulant aura for the remainder of time.

What I find interesting, scratch that, devastatingly annoying is the other type of sleep challenge.  The ones often solved by pills, warm milk, cold scotch or other roots or tonics that can aid a very tired person into a deep slumber.  I often suffer from this type of night terror, with last night being a particularly anxious episode.  I use the term anxious because that inability to fall asleep, to have your mind bounce from work to money to kids to neighbours to sex to lack of sex to food to food to food to why does my dog’s paws smell like nacho Doritos to infidelity to false lottery hopes to writing a blog to work satisfaction is very close to the same feeling of close to crazy that I have experienced in other times of my life.

Now work definitely sets this insomnia off, as does frayed nerves from a couple of back to back nights drinking.  Combine work stress and hangover nerve damage and I am lying wide awake at 3:14am listening to the raccoons squeak their strategy around getting into our green bin.  Last night I attempted to go to bed at 11:23pm, which is atypically late for me, but I could feel the tightness in my chest and gunning of the brain engine, so I was trying to be as tired as I possible before making the leap from couch to bed.

I moved from position to position, from bed to bed (Hud’s bedroom has a tantalizing cross breeze that I hoped would soothe my thoughts back to benign), finally getting to sleep at just after 5am, only to awake for work at 6:04am.  Yawn, stretch, lather, rinse, repeat, scream.

So here I sit, head feeling like a bowling ball balanced on top of a MacDonald’s straw, doing the only thing I know how to do, wax on about it in my getting more familiar word sponge, my blog.

Is it the same as complaining?  Tonight should be better.