Miss R is the sweetest. Our little band of public therapy rompers encounter her sometimes at one of our local Target stores. She of the fabulously sparkly scarf, brimming with kindly energy and enthusiasm, asked me January 1st, 2020 how my day was going. Only after hearing the sepulchral dustiness of my answer, and glancing into the shadowy embers of eyes charred by long days and seemingly limitless nights of demanded wakefulness, did she realize something was off with me. Way off, given how little sleep I’d had the night before. She may have recognized me from prior visits (we are kinda hard to forget sometimes… just saying), but I’m not sure she realized exactly what she was talking to.
As a New Year’s Mombie, I had climbed my artificially energized corpse (animated by the power of the caffeine ingested by me) out of bed to start my workout overflowing with a list of grievances. Knowing I could be in for painfully scant sleep if Tony woke up early, I declined staying up until Midnight with Andy and Hannah. They feasted, watched movies, and lit sparklers while I drug my lame self off to bed warily snuggling up to a dim hope that I could get at least a few hours of sleep before Tony awoke at an hour that was often unpredictable, but predictably prematurely early.
In all of the years we have lived in our current home, I can’t recall a more active year with celebrants setting off bottle caps or shooting guns from about 10pm until Midnight. Every boom and crack jarred me far away from sleep’s grasp. Sometimes these sound bursts overlapped, and part of me privately seethed that our neighborhood revelers chose celebratory activities that showed little thought for those that couldn’t sleep in late the next day- and that equally betrayed a lack of awareness of the needs of those members of our community with sensory differences and acutely sensitive hearing.
Miraculously, Tony managed to sleep through all of that- even though I could not. Over the past few years he has become a deep enough sleeper during the first few hours of his rest that sounds exceeding the volume of his sleepy time music won’t disturb him. I finally was able to fall into a shallow sleep shortly after midnight when our local celebrants finally took their festivities more quietly indoors. However, at 1:28 am Tony was wide awake, the main effects of the Guanfacine having worn off. Three hours later he stilled himself again in slumber. I got another hour of rest before the constraints of our schedule required me to feign wakefulness as best I could.
I had skimped and sacrificed everything I could from my workout to make a little more space for sleeping, because over a year of this has started to rip shreds of perceived wellbeing out of my inner calm. But this hour was all that was left to me. When Andy asked how my night went, I assaulted my honey’s ears with my thoughts on all of the outdoors noise makers. He suggested that next year I get up and have a very raucous outdoors New Years celebration of my own around 5am. Sufficiently rested me would never be so petty, but sleep-deprived me howled with laughter, gleefully rubbed her hands together, smirked wickedly, and said, “You know, I might just do that.” Neighbors, you’ve now been warned. 😉
New Year’s Day was Emily’s first day back from vacation. Tony was elated she had returned, and we tried to get through the things we would typically do, such as public therapy. Our little man was so excited to see her back, he tried to run off and initiate a game of chase with Emily in Target so many times I honestly lost track of the point of actually keeping track of the number of attempts. Obviously, chase is not an acceptable behavior in stores. Because I don’t want anybody else to be responsible for anything that should go wrong on these locations, I will run after him myself (because somebody must to prevent damage to store goods or others he’s not paying attention to in his path) while Emily stays put.
Every Guanfacine dose increase has come with weight gain, and my son is now approaching 100 pounds. He’s also grown 2 inches in the last 27 days, and at seven years old is nearly as tall as Emily. An hour of physically blocking and stopping a nearly 100 pound kiddo who is moving at his maximum speed and force will wear you down if you’re already inadequately sleeping. By the time we got to Miss R, I was feeling like I couldn’t even pretend to be death warmed over.
Truly, she is the sweetest thing…cheerfully asking if Tony liked stickers and if she could offer him one. She looked puzzled by my answers that seemed uncharacteristically devoid of life, and I tried to explain what was going on because I do like her (we’ve been in her checkout lane before) and don’t want to come across like a total jerk even if I was feeling more than a bit under-animated.
But, honestly, unless you’ve lived this… you can’t fully appreciate exactly what it feels like to be a New Year’s Mombie.
