Insomnia

When the internal hyperactive meets the neglectful daughter of ageing parents in the small hours of a wakeful morning.

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it."

― John Steinbeck

3am. 

And I’m woken by a hacking spluttering that repeats loud enough and often enough to call me from dreams about conversations that never happened with people I never see and turn to switch the bedside light on low and see the dog, my boy, my baby, still prostrate, too tired to sit up, hacking up the phlegm from a night that, if I didn’t know him better, I’d think had been filled with heavy smoking and too much dairy. 

I rouse myself to sit up and place a hand on his warm soft back as he splutters and gags again and turns his brown Disney eyes to me to say—

I’m tired, mam, but this cough won’t let me sleep. 

And so I shift my feet off the side of the bed and into the too loose Crocs that aggravate the pinging nerve in my left little toe to slop out to the kitchen and rummage one-handed in a too cluttered cupboard for the tiny, disproportionately priced jar of manuka honey that reminds me of a long time ago on the other side of the world with family I barely know, the jar we bought especially for the dog the last time he had a cough that wrenched his little body into pieces. 

Dip a sundae spoon shallow into the honey’s surface—just enough to soothe a canine night time fever.  Slop back to the bedroom where my boy’s waiting for me, bleary eyed, to rescue him. He licks the spoon, up and down, front and back then licks my palm that, cupped below the spoon to protect the bedding, has caught the final drops of sticky sweetness in its crease. I kiss his head lightly right on top of the white flash at the centre of his terracotta red—a hairstyle that earned him the nickname “little flowerpot”—and feel the perfect curve of his skull against my lips as, with a sigh, he turns his nose into his own crooked paw beneath a fold in the duvet and leaves me, now awake, alone in the 3am. Completely alone and dead inside my chest. 

This is not a depression. It’s not that old weighty absence of feeling that once pulled me deep into its fog and held me captive for months on end. This is just what happens every time I wake at this hour. A dullness that sits just to the left of the centre of my chest. A flutter of anxiety that has no discernible origin or cause, other than the futility of this hour that never, not even on the clearest of midsummer nights, ever sees sunlight. 

I could do my usual when 3am wakes me and switch off my thoughts entirely by switching on the rot of Netflix and Facebook and News in an endless and repeating round of all the stuff that keeps me from thinking until my eyes close from exhaustion and my brain still rattles with other people’s stories. And for a time I do. But then as 4am rolls into view my bladder stirs and pushes me up again. I leave my phone behind for an uncomfortable moment of respite from the self-inflicted noise and, seated in a dark bathroom with eyes closed, I hear another whisper—a quiet voice inside my head that says—

—She is an infection.

  And so, when I come back to bed, I am here, tapping words into the notes on my phone on a black night-mode screen and thanking the god I don’t believe in for this tool in my hand that, like every tool ever made, is both blessing and curse combined. 

She called while I was in class. Online. Listening to the tutor talk about “voice” and adopting a persona when we write. 

You can’t please everyone all of the time the tutor says. You’re not responsible for who your reader sees. They’re responding to the character that they need.

And I feel my wrist vibrate as the call comes in. My body tenses. My thoughts slow. And then a minute later—another vibration. A message. 

I resist the urge to respond immediately, to cut out of class and get the inevitable out of the way. I resist the urge to run away—to go for a long walk that will take me out of signal and away from responsibility—the urge to delete the voicemail unheard—to fall back on the useful truth that my phone’s faulty, that it rarely rings or tells me when I have a message. I try to bring myself back to the class—only ten minutes left before I have to make a decision—nine minutes, eight minutes, seven until I have to leap over the unanticipated crocodile pile. Six minutes until I have to revise my armoury of tools that help me minimise information passed while still appearing pleasant, compliant, nice. Five minutes until I have to adopt an old fallback persona. The grey rock. Four minutes of mentally shutting myself down, breathing through old anxieties, wondering why the hell, at nine months shy of fifty years old, I am still a helpless fucking child. 

When she’s dead, will I finally be free to live my life? 

The thought unweaves another skein of guilt. 

Who has these thoughts? What kind of person?!

Grey rock. Grey rock. Grey rock.

Okay, I can do this. 

Grey rock.

Pick up the phone. Listen to the voicemail. 

Make the call.

As always, she has phoned to remind me to do something I do not need reminding of. Her accusations of my neglect are, as always, couched in concern for my father who I spoke to not three days ago but who, she says, is deep in depression. She has just spent an hour in his company and he did not speak one word to her, instead he stood in the kitchen and made his dinner while she sat and offered advice about a sore foot that he did not take. 

She tells me her age. Again. 

Then she tells me his, with a slight emphasis on her anger.

I verbally nod with an mmMmm, unsure what she’s really trying to say. She won’t be here for very long? I should be more attentive? More committed? More compliant?

I choose to interpret her words in as grey a way as I can—a literal truth that’s easy to confirm, adding just a hint of admiration.

Yes. Eighty! 

But now I feel the pull to confirm other observations—my father’s taciturn nature, his explosive and unpredictable temper, his reluctance to comply with her instruction. And try to counter—gently—with reference to her own earlier statements and a drop of reassurance. 

It isn’t personal. 

He’s in pain.

My grey has slipped. This small offering of colour is an error—an opening to the possibility of real conversation. 

He now has two tuners for his audio system. TWO! One was faulty. He bought a new one to replace it and now the old one is working again. Ridiculous. He doesn’t have space for two tuners.

I slip back into the shadows.

She chips hard. Not just her words but her tone. The dead voice. The deep sighs. The stuttering aaah-ah-ah accompanied, I know although I cannot see, with a look up and to the left as though calling on some greater force to locate the words for her—a tick that precedes one of many well worn phrases that drive home her struggle to locate the words she needs.  

I lean into my own hard-wired instinct to give cheer, if not with the content of what I say then with the pitch and tone of my voice. A higher pitch. A lilting lyricism. Everything designed to create a fully rounded imitation of good humour. 

Everything’s fine. 

Everything’s well. 

No details needed. 

The call ends. It was fine. I didn’t die. 

But I do as instructed and phone my father—with a healthy measure of mother-instilled trepidation. It’s Proms season. He might be grumpy. He’s always grumpy when he’s interrupted during a concert.

And he is fine. Genuinely fine. He tells me about his foot. That the single dose of ibuprofen he’s taken hasn’t helped. I remind him that a single dose isn’t enough. He needs to take them regularly to reduce the inflammation. He’s surprised by this not-new information. And grateful.

He tells me about the old tuner. It wasn’t broken—it was the cable. Who knew that a cable could fail? Will he return the new one? No. He’s past the return window and it wasn’t expensive. He’s happy to have a spare. Just in case.

We talk in vague terms about visiting each other, keeping things loose. 

When we’re done, for a brief moment, I consider the need to call my mother back and reassure her that she—that he is okay.

And then I go and make dinner.

Sleeplessness is inevitable after one of these conversations. There are fewer of them these days but the intensity of her lonely anger is increasing. Every edge and facet of my grey rock is tested. 

But now it’s 5am and September for the first time in a year. The first pulse of daylight pushes beneath the curtains just as the first blackbird stretches its voice with a brief and busy chatter that ends quickly and leaves behind it a small amount of hope. 

Darkness is vanquished by the song of a solitary small bird and with it that nighttime edge of despair. 

And finally, comes sleep.

Afterword

Maybe this is unnecessary. Maybe I don’t need to offer an explanation for this piece. Maybe I don’t need to pre-empt responses that might interpret what’s on the page as some call for help or for guidance. But the instinct to explain is hard wired. Maybe, one day, I’ll reach a point of such supreme self confidence that I can publish a piece exploring the inner workings of my brain without also needing to qualify those workings—to offer the counter argument against myself. 

Maybe. 

But I sure as shit ain’t gonna get there without getting messy along the way. 

If you were raised by a challenging parent or two, you might recognise that ingrained habit of looking at things from everyone else’s point of view. The instinct to sublimate your own experience and make it less than everyone else’s. 

You’ve probably worked hard to understand the other side and offered empathy to those whose pain has leaked into you. (In real life and on the page.) I’ve written from that point of view before. I’ve offered nuanced, “well balanced” pieces where I explore my own culpability in the painful and defining episodes in my life.

But honestly, sometimes I do that to get ahead of the criticism. To make damn sure no one’s gonna accuse ME of lacking empathy!

This piece is not that. 

I want to test the edges of different voices in this space. Where do my own boundaries between guide and flawed human lie? Can I be both in one space? Can I be both angry and empathetic? Careful and caring?

I really hope so. Because if we don’t tell our own stories, no one will do it for us. That includes the messy, unkind parts of ourselves that we fight with every day (and every night). The parts that want to get angry and fight back and say it just wasn’t fucking good enough. 

Because both can be true. We can do our best and it still not be good enough. 

So this is not a piece that asks for your sympathy or your comfort. It’s just one voice—one aspect of my self that doesn’t play in public very often. It’s one small moment from life that doesn’t get involved in all the complexities, the background, the reasons why. This is the ruminating over-thinker, the internal hyperactive who meets the guilty, neglectful daughter of ageing, neglectful parents in the small hours of a wakeful morning. 

I wonder if it’s a voice you might recognise?