Hello Insomnia.
You're one of my oldest and least favourite of friends.
I want to punch you in the face. Especially when I've had a grand total of 6 hours sleep in the past 48 hours.
That means I've been awake for a total of 42 hours. That is un-natural, surely?
The only people who pull crazy sleep patterns out the hat like this are on-call doctors, nurses, midwives and the like, surely?
People who have some importance in the World and don't just exist to eat bread sticks and live in filthy PJs for their entire weekend.
Umm so that 'three' signage thing isn't some Scottish way of swearing with your hands. I'm illustrating the time I'm awake at.
3am.
And this, to me, is early. As in I don't feel all panicky about being awake at this time.
If I manage to sleep at 3am this means I'm doing 'good' in terms of sleep.
I look dead, don't I? That's because I am.
I fell asleep around the realms of 5am on Sunday, got woken by baby growls at about 8am or so, kept falling asleep on the sofa - which doubles as my bed right now seeing as our bed has 'interior design malfunctioned' and my whacky sleeping patterns disturb B - he likes his sleep and is grumpy without it - until B had to leave.
By 8.30am I was completely and fully responsible for another human being as my husband sailed out the door, on his way to church, without a care in the World. I drew imaginary knives into his back as it disappeared out the door.
Then I defaulted to CBeebies for my childcare - technically this isn't accurate, it's merely an entertainment source for my child which keeps him from squealing, squawking and clawing my face off (a hobby he's taken up lately.)
Bad, naughty, disgusting parenting. I know.
Well, I don't care.
I just wanted to shut my eyes for five minutes and let this responsibility dissolve.
What I really wanted was to 'get better' - whatever that means. I want some semblance of a life where I go to bed, wake up feeling like a human being and do 'normal Mum stuff' like going to the park on my own or getting out more than once every month. I would also like to go to church.
I would like not having to worry about my muscles wasting away to nothing, rotting like an apple core inside of me.
I often worry that if I express how I feel about my illness and what it does to me that it will somehow expose me as this truly awful and horrible person/mother - of which I know I am neither but I know that opinions can flood in and cloud my otherwise balanced view of myself.
So I keep myself to myself about this illness (M.E.) but I'm tired of doing that now.
I know that the only person who truly grasps the reality of this situation is B. I put a show on for everyone else. All I really do for Roman is give him breast milk. I can't even feed him his food because my arm seizes up (this is a new development and scares the heck out of me.) B does a majority of the nappy changes, bath time, clothes changes, food shopping and all major baby care duties. I even have to shout on him if Roman is crying in the mornings because, at the best of times, I struggle to lift Ro Ro out of the cot.
When I change a nappy it's a good day and they don't come around often.
That is so hard to admit that it hurts. I can't believe what a shockingly and appalling horrible wife and mother M.E. has made me become. I've turned into a monster and I hate it. I want my life back. The one where I didn't even know I had this stupid illness. What good has it done me to know about it, anyway?
'There's nothing we can do/there's no cure,' is a constant rhetoric I hear from doctor after doctor.
Well Master Quinn had a chest infection and since I had one back in December (when I mentioned this to B he said 'did you? really?' and it made me smile. I'm sick all the time so everything blurs into the background for us) I really didn't want to inflict this condition onto anyone. Plus, B had a talk today. I felt the right thing to do was send him out to church.
Of course, I woke up, and didn't want him to go but I felt I couldn't back track on what we'd agreed so I went with it.
I didn't shut my eyes for five minutes, of course, nor did I truly want the responsibility to dissolve, I just wanted to find a guilt-free way of dealing with things.
So I put on Pingu and we had a nice cuddle on the sofa all morning (okay, lies, he crawled all over me and kept climbing down a hundred times, then tried to climb back up again!)
And I felt good about it. For once I was the mother I should be, the mother who can just shut off the voices of judgement and criticism on her abilities and just soak up the moment, enjoy it for what it was.
It was just us three snuggled up in our family blanket (with Roman fighting his feet free) on the sofa and cuddling together;
Me, my son and CBeebies.
Bliss.
