Deja Knew

I find myself sitting at the computer having opened it up with a very clear mission in mind, only to find that by the time I’ve turned it on I have absolutely no idea whatsoever of what I was going to do with it. So, here I am, deciding to write this post, hoping that half way through I might remember what the hell I’m doing here. Ever since having my son, this ‘losing my mind’ feeling seems to have become a daily, sometimes hourly experience. I know the well-known science says it’s all hormonal blah blah, but it does seem to correlate with lack of sleep, for me, anyway. The less well-known science called Chronobiology, or the study of biological clocks, seems to back this up. Thanks to a combination of our genes and our environments, each of our clocks is set so that we all need a specific amount of sleep. If we get less, our clocks go nuts, our bodies freak out and our brains can’t operate. 

During my dark moments, I often feel guilty about how much sleep I need - other people operate on less, why can’t I? But that’s just it, I NEED a certain amount of sleep. My lucky husband (-to-be..eventually) seems to be a born clubber - he can get 4 hours sleep and still grin manically all day. If I get 4 hours sleep, I need to be locked up away from any living being. It’s bloody annoying. We’ve had many a ‘conversation’ about this and for some reason, he still finds it hard to relate to my sleep issue, but I’m sticking to my tired guns here. PND makes you feel like it’s all your fault, that you’re just being weak, but that’s PND, not reality. Sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture, for God's sake.I felt less teeth-gnashingly frustrated when I accepted I needed a certain amount of zzzz and did whatever I could do to get near to it. This meant ignoring the fact my house was a mess and I was working the 4 Days Unwashed look and forcing myself into bed whenever my son slept. I know this sounds really obvious, but it’s very easy to prioritise other things, especially when you’re feeling shit about yourself. If you look around a dirty, crazy room, sometimes it can make you feel like this is a reflection of your inner state and sometimes that evidence is hard to bear. But, sleep is more important. Sod the house. And if you find that you’re lying there thinking ‘This is my chance, I need to sleep, but I can’t sleep. Oh God, I need to sleep...but I can’t sleep’ - an exceedingly dull script I’m very bored of by now, sometimes reading a very easy, mindless book helps. I know it feels like the last thing you want to do when you're totally exhausted, but through reading you escape your frazzled mind and do something you did before you had your baby...and often you'll find yourself escaping into zzz land.

I still have absolutely no idea why I switched my computer on. I also have no idea why I’ve developed a knack for leaving the house with my flies undone or finding bizarre objects in bizarre places they really have no right to be (e.g. salad cream in my bathroom cabinet). I do however know that my fish fingers are now ready and I’m going to scoff them before going straight to bed at 8.30pm. Rock ‘n’ roll. Nightie night.