As I was putting Grace to bed tonight, she asked me to rub her back. She loves having her back rubbed and scratched. She was on her side and I could feel her spine through her skin, a curving row of symmetrical bumps. I remembered, suddenly, her 20 week ultrasound. I remember seeing the bright string of pearls that the technician pointed out as her spine. It seems extraordinary to connect that abstract, beautiful image to this living girl. While so much of my pregnancy and early motherhood with Grace was ambivalent and conflicted, I remember that ultrasound as a morning of breathless wonder. What I remember was intense fascination in the anatomical details that were visible: here are the four chambers of the heart, here is the spine, here are the fingers. I don’t recall, and with hindsight this doesn’t surprise me, feeling any sense of the black and white images being a baby. But I do recall a wave of overwhelming awe that beneath my still not-pregnant-looking stomach lived this fully-formed human being.After my unexpected flashback I tucked Grace in and left the room. Unfortunately that was not the end of it. She emerged a few times to complain about her nightmares and I felt both aggravated and empathetic. I zealously protect my the three hours to myself in the evenings, but I also know the profound anxiety of being unable to sleep. I remember, probably at about Grace’s age, coming out of my own room and wandering to find my parents. Somehow those evenings reminded me of seeing a school teacher at the grocery store; a teacher out of context was confusing, the notion that they had a life outside of the classroom was confounding. The same emotion accompanies my memory of those nights with insomnia. Somehow it was hard to imagine that my parents had a life after I was asleep. I remember approaching my parents sheepishly, blinking heavily against the light.
My father was brilliant in these moments. I remember exactly what he did, and somehow he never seemed impatient. He used to give me two suggestions: go to your room and try to stay up all night, and go to your room and see if you can count to 1000. Both work, by the way, and I’m now employing them with Gracie.
On the topic of insomnia, my own is still alive and well. I sometimes have to take 3 tylenol PM to knock myself out, and even that doesn’t always work. Redheads apparently need 25% more anesthesia to go under for surgery. This feels correlated, somehow, to the fact that enough soporific meds to knock out an elephant sometimes can’t subdue me.
Random thoughts about sleep and lack thereof, about heredity and anatomy, on this first night of April. Happy birthday James Wood!