Tag: Insomnia

On Sleeplessness, Starlings, and Sparrow Eggs

By Catherine DiMercurio

This morning began too early, as mornings sometimes do, when I wake at 4 to let the puppy out, and I cannot fall back to sleep. Maybe today it was actually 3, with all the springing forward. It is usually the second hour of trying to get back to sleep when the turn occurs. When I know I’m running out of time. When the day will begin whether I’ve slept enough or not.

I took the dogs for a long walk just after the sun came up. Afterwards, we played in the yard. I filled the bird feeder. My son rose a while after I did, and we watched the birds together for a bit. A starling tried to attack a sparrow nest as the pair guarded their eggs. The sparrows built their nest under the roof of all that remains of my sunporch, the walls of which we demolished due to a carpenter ant invasion. I am currently planning on having the sunroom rebuilt. Hopefully the baby sparrows will have hatched by the time construction begins, if it does. Plans sometimes elude us.

We all feel under attack sometimes; the world is full of starling-shaped threats. We all have to rebuild; our worlds are perpetually damaged in big ways and small by tiny things that eat away at our foundations.

This year has left many of us simultaneously grateful for our shelter and exhausted by sheltering in place and overwhelmed, as if we are drowning in place. We look around at all that is to be done, still. When I am unable to sleep, these feelings are heightened. The dogs fall back to sleep. The sparrows have chased off the starling. I have no such luck.

This past year, the day-to-day lives within our homes have been relentlessly predictable, but at the same time, we crave the familiar and the predictable within the larger world, within the larger time. We want to know what is next, what comes after this part, even while we know what tomorrow and the next day and the next look like.

Last night, as I considered all the worries roiling in my unsleepable brain, I told myself that some things are not for solving; they simply unfold. I employed the little mindfulness technique I’d just read about to calm anxiety. Things got blurry sometimes, the line between wakefulness and sleeping, like the way a wispy cloud fades into the blue sky. I imagined myself strolling down a little country road in England, where I’ve always wanted to go, a yellow stone cottage on my left, a creek tripping along on my right. I’m sure I slept lightly, a little, but whenever I felt myself falling backward into the pool of deep sleep something shoved me forward, as if I was meant to skip through time, to morning, spring forward, spring forward. Normally I’m impatient for what is next, but sometimes I wish I could remain longer in a dozy half-made world.

In a way, this whole year has been a bit blurry. Having to move in the first few months of the pandemic, and getting settled in a new and unfamiliar place, has left me a bit muddled. As I walk through the neighborhood with the dogs, some faces are becoming newly familiar. At first it was refreshing to shake off all my old history. And I still do feel refreshed, sometimes, but it is also very strange to be waking into this spring, my first here, and finding myself perpetually in a place where I am largely unrecognizable to the people I see, and they, to me. I don’t have any regrets about the move, but I don’t know how to do this yet, and the pandemic has made it difficult to keep in touch in a meaningful way with those I left behind. My story is not unique; we have all dealt with different levels of isolation over the course of this year. And I have been so incredibly fortunate in so many ways.

I am simply . . . recalibrating.

Recalibration is the easiest way I can think of to describe a daily reflection on perspective, a frequent readjusting of the way I look at this circumstance, or that one, whether it is the worry that keeps me up at night or the obstacle that trips me up during the day. I think of the sparrows fending off the starling and realize this: nothing that picks away at the peace I try to carefully construct is a matter of life or death. I am not guarding nest and egg. Though in a way, I am, we all are. I am striving toward many things – wellness of heart and mind, those constructs that house my me-ness, as well toward ensuring the vitality of my own hopes and dreams – those eggs I’m perpetually incubating.

Sometimes I’m unsure about what it is okay to want. What is greedy, what is unrealistic, what will hurt too much to not have. But when I think that way, it feels as if I’m being both the starling and the sparrow egg.

I don’t have anything against starlings, though many loathe them. They are doing what instinct tells them, even if, from the outside, it hurts to watch them ruin little sparrow lives, and we will chase them off if given the chance. We owe it to ourselves to do the same for ourselves.

Love, Cath

On Wanting, Writing, Sleep, and Geraniums

By Catherine DiMercurio

Usually, a blog post finds me, I don’t have to go looking for it. It’s like a little floaty seed pod, a dandelion fluff, that drifts my way and takes root. But I realized it has been a while since my last post, and nothing had declares itself. I thought about the geraniums I brought in from the porch when the temperature suddenly dipped. Everything was still in bloom, the early week had surprised us with 80-degree temperatures, and then, it was suddenly and consistently going to be below freezing at night. So I brought in eight plants. I rearranged the living room, the dining room, and made places for the terra cotta pots near the windows. I’ve never brought in impatiens before, but they were still blooming, so I will experiment. I’ve watched them for almost a week now, as they begin the expected transition. Leaves yellow and fall away. They get scraggly. I water often as they get used to the indoor temperature that fluctuates only a little. I worry they won’t get enough light.

Compensation

When this house was purchased we didn’t think about the way that porch I loved so much would prevent the light to pour into the living room from the southern-facing windows. I think about trade-offs, about transitions, about the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote about compensation, something about loss and gain, I will look it up later, I tell myself. As always, I seek a metaphor to make meaning, this time in the geraniums.

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Sleep and Not-Sleep

When I suffer from a few weeks of troubled sleep, I recall the cycles of the past. It won’t last, I tell myself. It’s stress, hormone fluctuations, it’s normal, be patient, try this or that. I try. I look for the gain that comes with this loss – I finished a book at 3:30 a.m., I thought some interesting thoughts as I let my mind wander. In the mornings, I talk to my son, always tired, with five classes of AP homework and cross country practice. Our morning conversations always involve how did you sleep. We report out. I tell him I can’t find a metaphor about insomnia, something that will make it matter, make meaning, and he says stop looking. He says the lack of the metaphor is a metaphor. I have to turn this over in my head many times. But I keep looking. There must be something here.

Writing and Wanting

It’s not that I haven’t been writing. While I waited for interesting blog post ideas to find me, and I said things like – I can’t go on road trips to California all the time and have I said all I wanted to say? – I’ve been working on a story. I told myself, when I began, it would probably be a flash piece of under 1,000 words. But as I wrote, it shaped itself into something more and I’m at a place where I decide, is it, in it’s almost-6,000-word current state, a part of something larger, or is a regular-sized short story hiding in there waiting to be found and pruned? I like this place, of possibility and growth and richness. Sometimes I’m sad that my job doesn’t make me feel this way. I wonder, could it? Am I looking at it wrong? And I wonder, should it? Am I being greedy? I have my writing. I have my mothering.

“For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”

Greed and Goals and a Little Bit of Luck

It’s hard to say. When I was in high school, it was common for many people not to go to college, and if they did, to not go away to school. My parents didn’t go to college, and not a lot of people in their extended families had either. I didn’t know any college people, but I figured I should. I didn’t know anything about how. I didn’t know about wanting it. I remember my guidance counselor talking to me about where I could go, with my grades. He talked about how it was possible, with financial aid and scholarships. He cracked a door open I hadn’t thought about too much as if to say this is for you, not just other people. He helped me to want something for myself I didn’t know was available for wanting. Sometimes I wonder if I don’t dream big enough but when I do, I wonder, is it being greedy? To want that, too? And I wonder, who cares, but I don’t wonder that often enough.

When I think about how to tie all of this together, I think of the way you can trick geraniums into blossoming all winter. They get confused for a bit, when it’s suddenly about 67 degrees all the time. It’s almost as if they can’t believe their luck, and maybe it’s not real, it probably isn’t, and there goes another leaf, we probably aren’t going to make it. But I’ve been bringing the geraniums in every fall for more than ten years and I’ve only had one not make it.

Maybe it’s greedy, wanting the geraniums to bloom through the winter. It’s probably not that hard, and I’m sure lots of people do this all the time and don’t consider it greedy or a miracle or anything, it’s just what you do with geraniums.

Love, Cath