Why yes, I’m up at 2.15 am. Why do you ask?
My sleep has gotten increasingly worse over the last month and at the moment my weird sinusy-flu bug is not helping at all. I simply can’t find a comfortable position where, upon dozing off, I’m not almost instantly startled awake by not being able to breathe through my nose. Our bed is horrendously uncomfortable these days as well. The mattress was never good quality but after three years of use, it sags terribly in the middle and the bed frame CREAKS every time you move even a muscle.
On top of that, stupid worries keep running through my head. I say “stupid” not because they’re inconsequential things…but they are not things I need to be worrying about in the middle of the night. As concerned as I am about my friends and your lives, I do not need to be lying awake at night saddened that I won’t ever live in the same place as my childhood best friend again, or upset about the estrangement between Donna and her daughter J. Those are both very unfortunate things, but IT IS NOT MY BRAIN’S JOB TO THINK ABOUT THEM WHEN I SHOULD BE SLEEPING INSTEAD.
Tomorrow (actually, later today) I have a full day of watching a little boy who’d rather be outside running around when I’m feeling too drained by this evil bug to have any desire at all to go to the park. The library? Not an option. The last time we went, he spent the whole twenty minutes that I could bear to be there running back and forth between the two walls of the (small) library, pointing at the clocks on opposite walls and shouting “GICK GOCK!! GICK GOCK!!” (tick tock). The old, grumpy men who are the only inhabitants of the library at 10.30am on a weekday glared, although one old but not-so-grumpy one saved Ciaran from losing himself when he tried to make a mad dash for freedom during the thirty seconds I was trying to find myself a book.
Ugh.
Times like this I really wish I had a car, so that I could drive out to a nice garden centre with a cafe, have some lunch, and let Ciaran run around the pots and plants. He wouldn’t cause any damage and I wouldn’t want to murder him every time he SHRIEKED!! in my teeny-tiny flat.
The rat (rat family?) that inhabits the walls of our flat is up too, it seems. I can hear the scrabbling in the wall. I have no great love of rats, pet or wild, but as this one has been living there for a couple of years and we’ve never seen any sign of it in our flat, we are in a happy state of coexistence. As so many people can’t be bothered actually putting their bags of rubbish into the covered tips, I suspect that the rat is well-fed and has no need to try to break into our messy but not filthy (not food-filthy, anyway) flat. Hopefully that situation continues until we move out at the end of May.
Insomnia really, really sucks. If I were in my old flat in Austin, I’d ditch my bed now and try sleeping on the futon, or vice versa, but there are no alternate sleeping places in this flat, as the couches are both loveseat-size and have arms that are as hard as rock and absolutely painful, even when padded by multiple pillows.
I just want to sleep! And have someone take care of my baby all day so that he wouldn’t have to listen to grumpy termagant mother and I wouldn’t have to keep up with a high-energy toddler!!
I want my own mom – I don’t want to BE mummy today.
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