Sleeping

Lily is just over 20 months old, and only recently started sleeping through the night on a regular basis.  Coming out of a perpetual sleep-deprived state has been a revelation, to put it lightly.  For about a year there I convinced myself that I was okay, that I was somehow managing to make it through my days relatively unscathed by my mangled sleep pattern.  But then, as sleep returned to my world, so did the realization that I had made a HUGE FUCKING MESS out of MANY, MANY things.  I look back on reports that I wrote and see errors all over the place.  I remember fights that I picked with Jeff, triggered by the smallest and most random things.  I see pictures of myself and think “holy hell, Batman, who let me out of the house looking like THAT?”  I am beginning to understand why sleep deprivation is a form of torture.

But then, once in a while, still, Lily wakes up in the middle of the night, crying.  And I slip downstairs in the dead of night and fumble in the refrigerator for the milk, and I quietly steal into her room.  I lift her up, the sheer weight of her both a surprise and a comfort, and I settle down into the recliner where she drinks her milk and then immediately rolls over onto her stomach so that she is curled against my chest, her soft fuzzy hair tickling under my chin, her warm breath against my cheek, and I remember why I never fought the nighttime with her.