Touch You Last

I remember having a conversation with my brother after my niece Rachael was born. She was a few weeks old at this point, and Barry was looking a little haggard, but no worse than to be expected. I was twenty years old, and I asked the most important question I could think of about parenthood: “How are you doing without the sleep?” He said, “After a while, you realize you just don’t need it.” Fast-forward fourteen years and that’s proved true. Sort of. My brother has a far greater capacity than I do for getting by without much sleep, and I haven’t turned out to be the superstar he’s been in that regard, but I’ ve definitely learned to get by with a lot less. For at least the first three weeks, admittedly, I did not cope well with the sleeplessness. But after that, something happened. Things just… got better. Maybe my body realized that this is the new normal. And it’s not that I don’t feel tired, but I’ ve just found a way to push that fatigue off to the side somewhere. I don’t nod of...

Weeknights, my bedtime comes at midnight. That’s generally the earliest I pass out and that means I average seven hours of sleep a night. It works. It grinds me down a bit as the week goes on, but I usually catch up on a few lost hours over the weekend. Now, I’ve tried experiments with getting less sleep before which have always been unsuccessful. But this week I’m trying something crazy: I’m getting more sleep. I think it started Sunday, where I was half unconscious by 11:00, and rather than fight it like I usually do I just went to bed. And I felt really good the next day. It felt so nice I tried it twice. Then it occurred to me that there are worse weeks for me to be building up my sleep stores. So, all of this week I’ve been getting a full eight hours of sleep. I can definitely feel the difference. My concentration is better, my mood has been consistently good, in general I feel measurable more with it . I miss that hour, though. That’s a full on hour of Me Time I’...