The Guest Room, Energy Saving Emails, and Sleep Deprivation
Welcome back to Behind the Scenes...
My daughter has started referring to the back room as the “guest room”. I don’t know why or where it came from. There’s no bed in there or anything else that would lend it to being offered to a guest, certainly not to stay the night. Maybe I’d call it a den. Sometimes I refer to it as my office or when I’m envisioning my future self as a sage old author, I call it the library.
I’m sitting in the room right now, actually. Sitting at my desk, which is right next to my daughter's little retro school desk - one the previous owners of the house left for us, that I made my husband and brother-in-law haul downstairs so it could sit next to mine.
There’s a bookshelf and the $500 chair my husband and I splurged on when our daughter was first born (it swivels and rocks and is basically the most comfortable piece of furniture I’ve ever owned).
That’s pretty much all the room will hold. There’s just enough space to roll out a yoga mat, which I do on occasion. It’s nice to practice beside the large slider door that overlooks the backyard, which, at the moment, is covered in several feet of snow.
I’m supposed to be working today - writing articles for a couple outlets that pay me actual money (albeit not quite enough to afford the 5,879 Amazon purchases I’ve made this month). I dropped the kids at the in-laws, stopped for coffee, read all my emails (even the one about lowering my monthly energy bill), and now I’ve opened a random Word doc to write something that I will definitely not get paid for.
I don’t know how people do it. Sit here and come up with witty or meaningful things to say. Anything that anyone would actually want to read (I mean more than anyone wants to read emails about energy saving tips).
I can hear the ticking of the kitchen clock and the hum of trucks going by on the main road just at the end of our street. My refrigerator makes weird gurgling sounds - like my stomach after I’ve eaten too much cheese.
My arms are growing heavy, as are my eyelids, just thinking about all the things I need to do. No one tells you that the hardest part of parenting is continuing to function as a normal human being when you repeatedly get little to no sleep each night.
My three year old daughter - the one who refers to this room as the guest room - has gone from five star sleeper to negative yelp review, all night waker-upper. She is suddenly too scared to fall asleep without myself or my husband by her side. When we try to leave, she screams like we’ve abandoned her on the side of an old, dark highway at the Texas border.
Once she does actually fall asleep and we’ve managed to Macgyver our way out of her room without waking her, we sleep on pins and needles, just waiting for the moment she wakes for another round of horror-movie-level screaming.
This morning it came at 1am - just as I had finally hit the depth of actual slumber. Her terror woke me so suddenly, I bolted out of bed before I even realized what was happening. Somehow my feet marched my body into her room and I was sitting bedside, soothing her, when I realized something awful; I had to pee.
Not in the, I can wait it out and go when she’s back asleep, sort of way. More like in the, I’m already frantic because I’m about to pee myself in my three year olds bed, kind of way. But if I leave she’ll scream more and as much as I feel bad that this mystery fear has gripped her and won’t let go, I also don’t want her to wake her 18 month old brother because my bed and my soul are just not big enough to deal with them both at the same time on a Wednesday night.
So I take her with me to the bathroom and resign myself to another night of heels and elbows in my back as we snuggle into my bed together.
And now I sit here after all of that, and a sleepy drive out to grandma’s and back, attempting to string words together and make a few extra bucks to cover our rising energy bill (look man, I followed all your tips last month but these sub zero temps outside don’t give a shit how much sun I let in through the windows yesterday afternoon).
Maybe I’ll just go refill my coffee - real quick - and then get to work. For real.