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I’m Not Average at Sleeping
When sleep hygiene isn’t the problem…what is?
Something has been weighing on me lately. It’s not the chaos my life has suddenly become due to, you know, life happening. It’s not the fact that I’m finally going to get to be an empty nester and live alone with my husband for the first time since we’ve been married. It’s not even that I had ankle surgery and a hysterectomy within three months of each other. What has been a problem is sleep.
This is not a recent problem for me. For as long as I can remember, and my mother complained about it, I have been a poor sleeper. As an infant, I’d jerk my way awake quite frequently, leaving my poor parents walking zombies. When my mother became a single parent, she often had to let me co-sleep because I literally could not sleep without someone next to me. What sleep I did get was restless and involved a lot of kicking. I remember being about six years old, and one of my family members would rock-paper-scissors for who had to lay down with me at my bedtime, staying still AND quiet for the hour it would often take me to go to sleep. Woe betide they left me before I was out cold. It would start the hour all over again. It was unpleasant for everyone.
When I was about seven, I finally got pushed into my own bed. I suspect that my mother hit a place of really needing to get some uninterrupted rest. She was also…
