notes from the fourth wall
this is a story about mothers and children who are very bad at sleeping
2008
“The closest I ever came to losing it was at bedtime,” my mother said. “This was after I divorced your father, before I met Pat. Matt would not go to sleep and I spanked him, and I felt like I could have spanked him forever. So I stopped myself and took you both over to Aunt Kiki’s house and went off on my own for a few hours. The next day I signed up for counseling. I didn’t want to be a person who could even imagine abusing her kids.”
I left my husband when my youngest was four months old, a few months before my eldest’s third birthday. I worked two jobs. I nursed my baby and tried to get my toddler to eat and we slept all three of us in my double bed. My big boy could only sleep wrapped around my body, one arm underneath my shoulders, the other across my torso, his little hand buried underneath my side. “Don’t burrow!” I’d admonish, but when I was the one holding him, I always tucked my fingers under his back in exactly the same way. We were burrowers, we couldn’t help it. My baby wasn’t a burrower. He would crawl to the end of the bed (which was pushed up against the wall both for safety and because the room was only ten feet square) and sleep far away from us. If he was feeling needy, he’d come sleep on my pillow, his stomach draped across the top of my head.
2015
Every night that I don’t take melatonin I have nightmares. Maybe it works, or maybe it’s just a placebo. If I skip my pill, I wake up gasping, my heart thrashing against my ribs like a trapped bird. I should be too old for this shit. I generally can’t remember the dream, just the feel of it. Fear is heavy, like breathing in steam or smoke. I look at my left breast—I can see it pulse above my pounding heart. Little rabbit jerks. Breathe, Lara.
“You always say you never slept when you were a child,” my mother told me in what she considered affectionate teasing. “You would insist that you didn’t close your eyes all night.” Her look is slightly vengeful, like she’s been waiting for years to show me what a silly child I was. “I’d go into your room at night and you were always asleep, but you’d never believe me when I told you so.”
“I’ve done research, Mom. I was a frequent night waker, and in children, they often don’t realize they slept, because they are awake so much.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said, with a look that told me she was appeasing, not conceding. “All I know is that it was so funny, how you said you never slept, but I always saw you asleep, your bed covered in stuffed animals.”
“I always thought you’d sleep better if you got rid of half of those stuffed animals,” my stepmother said. I changed the subject.
Do most people wake as frequently as I do? I woke so often as a child; I really did believe that I didn’t sleep. All I knew was that I was always staring at the ceiling. My light fixture was a fluted square with flowers etched into the glass. The plaster ceiling had brush-stroke swirls I knew like my own fingerprints. I always left my door open and the hall light on, so I could still see, but when my parents came to bed, they shut the light off, and the room was only dimly lit by the streetlights outside. I fell asleep staring at the ceiling and woke staring at the ceiling, so it didn’t feel like time had passed.
Now I know when I wake. I fall asleep on my right side, my body wrapped like a backpack against my lover, my hand tucked under his chest. My stomach fits perfectly in the small of his back. I tuck my left arm up under the pillow, and I wake when it goes numb. Then I flip over to my left side and reach my arm back to rest on his hip. He wakes up and turns over and encircles me with his arm. Later, we move to our backs, and our arms drift across the bed to hold each other’s hands. All night we wake and flop and grasp and touch and sink back into down pillows. When he is out of town, I still wake, my eyes hunting the clock instead of his body. Knowing the time grounds me, returns me to my present self, pulls me back from the dream world that feels more real than this one.
Whether he is home or away, every night I tune the television to a documentary or podcast before I close my eyes. I cannot sleep in silence. I need sounds to drown out my thoughts: the lists of things I need to do, the essays I don’t know how to finish. Quiet makes my brain louder. If I forget my melatonin, I wake in the early morning darkness with a sharp inhale, the fear clawing at my ribs, the burn in my chest, terror in my lungs. It feels like a craving, but for what, I don’t know.
2009
When my youngest was eleven months old, I got him to sleep regularly in a crib, and instead of nursing from my body, he drank soy formula from a bottle. My breasts could not keep up with shared parenting. I put an extra “baba” in his crib, so when he woke up, he could find it on his own and go back to sleep. The baby was the best sleeper of the three of us. Once he was down, I carried my three-year-old down to the living room and put on my Pure Eighties Dance Mix CD. I swayed
