shot at dawn sometime last week.
Mucho sleeplessness. Way too mucho. Going on ten days or so now, nearly half my nights have seen less than an hour of sleep.
This is not good.
Part hormonal insomnia, part getting out of bed multiple times a night to sit in the kids' room, part circadian rhythm shifting.
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A few days ago a local teenager climbed an embankment not far from our place and stood in front of an oncoming train and died. I have been haunted by this...due in some part to my sleep deprived state.
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Sleep deprivation is not good for hair plucking. My system is a bath of peri/menopausal hormones, my brain chemistry is far from shooting on all cylinders...I'm in a state of restless stasis. Pluck, pluck, pluck.
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My corrected corrective lenses are perched on my nose. Much better. I am feeling inclined to read again.
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Eleven weeks since my last period, another one came. It's been qualitatively different. Not normal is the new normal.
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The kids are growing a ton. Gem is changing inside and outside. I swear he goes to bed and wakes up and is another inch taller. He is morphing into a teen. The countdown to his birthday has begun.
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We're in the midst of a heatwave, but I have been so out of it I've barely noticed. Of course, I am using the air conditioners assiduously. And drinking lots of iced coffee and tea.
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I have been enjoying the game Candy Crush Saga. It's my first social media tie-in game. I've been playing it a lot. On a related gaming note, Gem bought a Wii U. It all happened quickly and was quite shocking because he has historically been a non-saver/-big spender. But, he had amassed quite the bundle of coin since his last birthday and so we chipped in just a little bit and the kids have been enjoying the new Wii system thoroughly.
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I am entering a non-productive cycle of the vicious kind. The sleep deprivation is affecting my capacity for stress management. I am starting to feel bad about things that I can't control...or can't control easily or readily. I am getting the bare minimum done on any given day...some days with more impromptu and nice flourishes than others. But there is no rhythm. Things feel haphazard and chaotic. I have been okay with that for months, but now, not so much.
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Cap decided he wanted to replace our long suffering kitchen trash can before his impending trip to Japan. We did our due diligence and checked out the selection at Bed Bath and Beyond...but we were not impressed. The cans that had the features we were looking for were crazy expensive. I found a great seeming can online at a restaurant supply store made by Rubbermaid in the USA. Not cheap, but not as costly as the highest end stuff in BB and B. Waiting for its arrival.
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Yep. Feeling unmoored. And grumpy. Called our first, brief, official family meeting a few days ago and proposed a month of seriously increased structure. I have been feeling quite a bit of tension holding the various strands of "home" together. Anything that can help increase harmony by paring away missed and/or mixed expectations sounds good to me right now. The kids were wary of committing to a month so we decided to assess how things were going after two weeks.
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The sky is lightening. It is 5:30. I cannot believe I've had another night with not a wink of sleep. I am going to play a round or two of Candy Crush and then head into the kitchen. My sister and brother-in-law are coming over for dinner and I am braising short ribs. Yum.
Peace and love.
4 comments:
This is so awful...and I've been there, while working....sometimes when the body is stressed the adrenal glands work overtime, keeping a tired body going so much that the body cannot fall asleep at all. And then caffeine comes into the picture, causing more adrenal over-activity...and since your periods have been unstable, I'd say you are entering menopause. Sleeplessness is a major component of it...and I don't envy you. You can take estrogen with progesterone to keep the symptoms at bay, or you can try alternative methods. But most of us suffer along with all of it. Since I had a hysterectomy/oopherectomy when I was 34, I went on hormone replacement therapy (primarily due to early onset menopause is correlated to early onset osteoporosis), and I stopped at 48, which is when I started REALLY having symptoms. I have one friend who increased her tofu eating deliberately since that contains estrogen...a question I have is while taking estrogen, isn't that just postponing the inevitable menopause?
And then not sleeping can contribute to depression, since your body and brain are so tired that you cannot control your thoughts or get any exercise...
So I cannot offer anything but support and sympathy....this is a time period in which you really have no control over your hormone or body!
What I really hated about insomnia was the constant brain fog...so I hope this passes quickly for you!
We're on parallel paths, my sister. I'm not sure I sleep at all anymore, just this strange twilight kind of sleep, always just slightly aware that I am not *quite* asleep OR awake. Ugh. I've finally started taking Todd's advice and, for the past two nights, have gotten up to practice qi gong. It's helped keep me kind of level, but, honestly, I am exhausted. Here is me, reaching across the blogosphere, giving you a qmt: =====<<<<< :-i
xoxo
Thank you, both of you, very much. It really helps to feel understood and less isolated. Hugs.
I agree that it helps to feel understood and less isolated. I also noticed in Goodreads that you want to read that menopause book by Christianne Northrup (I think that is her name). I read it too, but had a hard time applying much of what she discussed because I went through menopause not as a natural product of aging but as a direct result of major surgery.And because of my relatively young age, I needed HRT to keep heart disease and osteoporosis at bay....so I could not really do the 'natural' things I would have tried if I enter menopause in my late r 40s instead of my early 30's. But I think it is a good book and needed to be written!
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