Exhaustion has been taking its toll on my husband and me for a while because of our sleepless six-month-old. It wasn’t until this past weekend that I realized how much of a toll.
We had just woken up at my in-law’s house, and I was disoriented.
Was it night? The wee hours of the morning? Time to start our day? Was I in bed or the recliner? Was Luke in his crib or on me?
Sleep has been so sparse lately that these questions weren’t alarming to me.
I have come to expect disorientation in light of our around-the-clock wake-ups. We are in a fog, one akin to the parenting-a-newborn fog, where you lose your sense of time, and morning and night blur together. Whether we’ve been asleep for 15 minutes or as much as a glorious three hours, it’s all the same.
My memory was also vague. This did not alarm me either.
Forgetfulness is another thing I’ve come to expect – forgetfulness at all times, but especially in the morning after a long restless night. Even after a particularly good night of sleep, we can’t remember with any certainty details from the night before.
How many times had we been up? Who had gotten up when? Which time did he burp, spit-up, get fed, get his diaper changed?
One thing was certain: the previous night had been a particularly rough one.
I was also certain of something else: during our 4am wake-up, my husband had been drinking a diet coke and eating a protein bar while holding our son. As I caught him in action, I was perplexed by his middle-of-the-night snack choice and the dexterity required to do all of that while holding our nineteen-pound-semi-asleep baby and groggily asked him about it. He defended his carbs and caffeine saying they were all in an effort to keep himself awake through his shift.
Remembering this bizarre exchange in the morning, I wanted to address what was clearly becoming a diet coke dependence. I mean who drinks a diet coke in the middle of the night?
“Babe, did you really drink a diet coke in the middle of the night last night with that protein bar?”
“What protein bar????”
“You know, the one you had with your diet coke…”
His squinted eyes and tilted head gave me my answer. The entire vivid scene was apparently a mere figment of my imagination.
There had been no middle-of-the-night nosh!
After a steady spiral over the last few months, I realized that in the middle of the night, I had finally landed squarely in a state of delirium.
Watching my husband eat, drink, and hold was as vivid to me as my experiences I actually had, feeding and caring for our son throughout the night.
On the bright side, I feel like I have truly lived a scene out of the film Inception, which pretty much makes me friends with Leonardo Dicaprio.
