Tossing And Turning

Candy Schulman

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. 

I used to ease my young daughter to sleep, pretending to be Sandman, the mythical folklore character who sprinkles magical sand into her eyes, inducing beautiful dreams. My mom had used this bedtime ritual with me. As a teenager, whenever my daughter babysat, she transformed into a sandwoman to lull her charges into a trance. 

Where is my sandman?

I listen to raindrops on a phone app (which always sound fake). I can’t turn my mind off at pillow time. Am I too curious? Too worried? Too bored? Too old? Don’t I deserve to be kind to myself, as Buddhists endorse? Obviously not at bedtime.

One night I click off the light, ease into the sheets…and the alarming palpitations begin—keeping me even more awake than ever. At 2 AM, I’m online, scheduling an appointment with my doctor for the next day.

He’s a man my age, short and thin, donning black glasses and always prefers to talk about novels each time I sit across his desk. He wishes to be a writer. I wish to earn his income.

He peers at me with what I interpret as a silent diagnosis of “hysterical female.” I press him to pursue my palpitations further. He sends me to another doctor who plugs me into a Holter monitor for 24 hours. I have to click a button on this portable EKG whenever my heart beats wildly. A friend with arrhythmia tells me her Holter monitor once fell into the toilet when she was peeing. I manage to keep mine out of the bowl, but it malfunctions on its own. I have to start over.

Doc shrugs when the results come back benign.

I see a renowned cardiologist, explaining that I can swim laps for forty minutes, but the palpitations begin when I try to fall sleep. His stethoscope is unsurprisingly cold, but he says in the warmest tone, “There’s nothing wrong in here.”

Relieved, I let out one of those deep yoga nidra breaths that never soothe me into as little as a siesta.

“You feel it more in bed because of gravity,” Cardio Doc explains. Looking directly into my eyes, he adds, “You have to find a way to slow down your engine.”

“Where do humans get tune-ups?” I ask. 

“Life is a rhythm. It sways and swerves,” he says. Another frustrated poet.

I trade in my primary doctor of twenty years for a woman internist. I tell her I can’t sleep. I tell her I’m anxious.

“How long do you think your anxiety will last?” she asks.

“Until this crazy world calms down,” I say.

She looks at me strangely, and rattles off the insomnia tricks that haven’t worked. She’s more comfortable giving me a flu shot (extra dose version for “older” people) than exploring psychological reasons that might be keeping me awake. I feel haunted at bedtime, unable to stop ruminating about my past and current worries.

My husband can slumber anywhere. His father used to embarrass him by dozing off in front of company, sitting on the living room couch, mouth ajar, shamelessly snoring. He humiliated our daughter at one of her high school squash team matches; he’d lay on a couch in full view of all the players, and take a nap. It took many years for our daughter to find his public naps amusing.

He can catnap at 6 PM and fall asleep before midnight. Yet one in four women suffers from insomnia, more common in older women than in men.

My new diagnosis: older woman.

Hormones. Menstruation. Perimenopause. Menopause. Post menopause. I’m able to dream only while awake.

I join a Facebook group called The Wakeful Dead. Much advice. Sleep nude (I do). A forgiveness expert urges me to give up grudges (I have too many). A homeopathic healer in India wants me to eschew morning light. My friend, a psychiatrist in America, tells me to avoid afternoon light. Before the sun rises, I read an article warning that lack of sleep causes weight gain. So my expanding waistline is not from those middle-of-the-night snacks. 

I’ve tried all the tricks. Life is a rhythm, I toss and turn.

Then I visit a dispensary. The person ahead of me is buying something called “wedding cake.” No one likes cake more than I do, but this version is a pre-rolled joint to get you high, when I need to get low. I am surrounded by gray-haired Stoner Boomers seeking a buzz. I did that in the ’60s. I need REM sleep.

I purchase Bedtime Blueberry edibles (debit or cash only), grown sustainably in upstate New York at Florist Farms. The bud tender, who doesn’t look old enough to vote yet alone sell legal weed, assures me, “These gummies won’t give you a hangover, the way Ativan does to me.” 

That night, I settle into the suggested bedtime routine: no screens, dark room, a boring book on my Kindle. Sleep edibles take up to 45 minutes to start working. Within thirty minutes I am out. No more tossing and turning. I wake up refreshed, and for the first time in years, I experience what it’s like to have a good night’s sleep. Turns out dreamland can be purchased just two blocks from my home and at nearly every corner of the city.

Candy’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, The Cut, Longreads, Oldster, Brevity, among others. She is a creative writing professor at The New School in Greenwich Village and a private writing coach. One of her favorite John Lennon songs is “Jealous Guy.”