SLEEP
“How do people go to sleep? I’m afraid I have lost the knack,” so wrote Dorothy Parker. Like many of us, her sleep was stolen by worry about money, maybe too much alcohol, unhappy marriages, the desire to be recognized. We all know the myriad ways not to sleep–as Parker noted, “Early to bed, and you’ll wish you were dead.” Ah, but how sweet it is when sleep finally comes.
Mora Mora
Word Count 746
I didn’t know what sleep paralysis was when I was a child. But I knew the way the men in my Dalmatian hinterland village spoke about sleep—quietly, fearfully, as if it were something that could reach out and grab you. They called it mora.
We lived at the border between empires—the Venetian to the west, the Ottoman to the east. Our village sat on a fault line of history, where folklore and epic poetry braided together across centuries. Stories weren’t just stories. They were how we explained the shadows.
In this region, sleep wasn’t just rest. It was a door. A risk. And for the men, especially the young and unmarried, it was something else entirely.
Tossing And Turning
Word Count 950
All but one of my women friends have trouble falling asleep. Staying asleep. We’ve joined the Fatigued Post-Menopausal No Shuteye Club.
I’ve tried every trick, from Calms Forte to weighted blankets. I don’t count sheep. I’m a city girl.
Years of meditation practice fails me, a Jewish girl from Brooklyn trying to be Buddhist. Mindfulness clears my mind and makes me feel calm—until bedtime, when I’m wide awake.
Mom Radar
Word Count 727
Of all the people who have ever loved me, hurt me, or damaged me—there was no one like my mother.
Her story is too complicated to explain. The stories from her childhood are hard to hear. But by now, I don’t even know which ones are true, which are half-true, or which were borrowed from someone else’s life. Maybe it doesn’t matter. What I do know is that she had adventure in her bones. Her life could have been something magical if she hadn’t picked up so much baggage along the way. But the destruction she caused—intentional or not—was too much, and I distanced myself as best I could.
Sleep No More
Word Count 715
Abandoned babies quickly learn not to cry. I’ve heard it’s a survival instinct when predators lurk. They stay silent. They sleep. My adopted daughter, abandoned by the side of the road at the age of two months, slept through the night as a baby and toddler. That is, until toilet training began and things went south in the sleep department. Once she made it into big girl underpants, though, she went back to sleeping soundly.
The exhaustion of being a single mother working full-time left me stealing nano-second car naps when stopped at a red light, a loud honk jolting me awake as the light changed. But my daughter slept in the back seat, slept in the backpack on long walks, slept in her bed.
Nightmares
Word Count 901
Before I began making crosses from broken and found objects, I thought the place to find driftwood was on the beach. It’s not, at least not at the Gulf of Mexico. You’ll find driftwood in rivers, because trees line rivers. Whether what you pick up is driftwood or downed limbs bobbing on the current depends on how long the wood has been in the water. More time in the water, the more hollowed out it is. What I mostly find on the beach is seaweed and, once, a dead rat, Gulf waves gently rocking its plump body.
Before I began having night terrors, I thought I knew what sleep was: it’s when when we’re not awake, right?
Pain Relief
Word Count 443
I am in bed. The bed marks the parameters of my life. One month. The nails in my toes are as big as those used on an old railroad track. I try not to look, but my legs are raised as if I am a dead cow in a meat locker.
Because I am in pain, I am given frequent doses of a morphine derivative. The room swirls in shades of gray so it looks like the cyclones I have seen on TV that sweep across cornfields and lift barns and farm animals into the air. Faces of people I know blur by as if they are on a carousel.
Night Terrors
Word Count 1919
I was eight years old when I watched the 1985 music video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I was captivated by the nightmare version of Wonderland, where Tom Petty, as the Mad Hatter, terrorizes Alice in chaotic scenes I couldn't entirely understand. Nothing could have prepared me for the ending of the video, when we see Alice strapped to a table: her limbs remain her own but her torso has been transformed into a giant cake. She helplessly wiggled her hands and feet as I watched with increasing anxiety.
One Night At A Time
Word Count 1675
For the first two and a half years of my youngest daughter’s life, she slept on a monitor beneath her crib mattress designed to detect micro movements and to sound an alarm if she went into cardiac arrest while sleeping. She has a rare condition called Long QT Type 15, in which the interval between her heartbeats goes on for too long, so from the day she was born, we had to be around-the-clock-ready to revive her.
Loss
Word Count 555
I think a lot about loss these days. There are so many different kinds. Death is the big one, the loss of someone you loved. But there is also loss of mobility, loss of perspective. Loss of sleep. You can lose control, lose your sense of self. You can lose a friend during an argument over politics. You can lose your appetite. You can lose touch. You can lose hope. You can lose your hair. You can even lose your mind, although that is mostly a phrase we throw around. When I was young I had two recurring dreams. They stopped a long time ago. I consider that a loss.
Sleeping Beauty
Word Count 742
This is probably an awful thing to say, but I call my daughter-in-law “Sleeping Beauty,” behind her back, of course. This is because so often when we’re with her, she is sound asleep. She works very hard, my daughter-in-law. She keeps very late hours because of her work and when she can, prefers to sleep in, so we rarely see her. I often wonder if she is sleeping to avoid us, the in-laws, and who could blame her? We have so many questions, we ask a lot. We try not to be imposing or impossible while at the same time fully aware that we are very likely imposing and impossible and it’s likely the very thought of us makes her extra-tired. She is very beautiful when she is asleep, and also quiet. I have sympathy for how difficult it must be for her, thrown into a family of poor sleepers and early risers.
Shared Sleep
Word Count 1458
It had been 22 years since I slept with a man who wasn’t my husband. Now my ex-husband. The ink on the divorce papers was slow to dry and I was even slower to start dating. And I certainly wasn’t ready to invite anyone into the king-sized bed that we shared for all those years. So when, 25 months post-divorce, I found myself on a pull out Ikea bed in the studio apartment of the attractive and separated-but-not-yet-divorced father of three adult children, I felt a part of me had woken up.