Sleepytime Me

I would kill for a coma right now

I haven’t written one of these in a few weeks, and while I regret the gap, there are a lot of reasons for it. None of them are mind-blowing.

For one, we took a little February trip to Montreal (that was cut short by the Great Blizzard of ’26) and it screwed up my mid-week schedule, which is when I usually squeeze these out. For another, life is busy, and also the world is on fire, and sometimes it’s hard to get a handle on which latest outrage to be outraged about. So I get a little writer’s block.

But when it really comes down to it, those are just excuses to cover for the ultimate reason I get lazy about writing this or about doing anything: I’m tired.

And I don’t just mean existentially. Though that’s true too, thanks to the aforementioned outrages.

The tiredness I’m talking about right now is physical.

There are a lot of stages to being tired but any of the ones you experience before you have kids or turn 30 don’t count. I’m not talking about the kind of tired you get after a long day, or a workout, or an all-nighter spent rolling on Molly and making bad decisions. I’m talking about the kind of tired you get when studying is a thing of the past, partying has consequences, and one bad squat can sideline you from the gym for weeks.

I’m talking about the tired you get when you’re not only a parent but you’ve been one for a while, when you’ve not only gotten older but you start thinking early-bird dinners seem like a smart idea! It’s a sort of all-consuming fatigue, a bone-tiredness that can’t be assuaged by a good night’s sleep, or caffeine, or the substance. At a certain point, it becomes inherent to your being and there’s no turning back.

(I know I’m not alone, not in the broader context of parenting, or of middle age, or even in the very specific context of my own home. In fact, I barely have a leg to stand on, considering my wife has multiple sclerosis, which brings a level of fatigue and exhaustion — not to mention pain and discomfort — I couldn’t even pretend to experience. But that’s never stopped me from whining before so buckle up!)

There are mitigating factors, of course. If you do have a long day, or a grueling workout, or you spend the night partying or just awake worrying about your life, those can add to your tiredness, but the point isn’t that you cna’t get extra tired, it’s that your baseline energy level is simply exponentially lower than it used to be. You can’t add to that baseline, and you can’t subtract from your exhaustion. It’s a cumulative thing, and it often starts when you hit a certain age, whether you have kids no not. But it definitely starts earlier if you do.

Every expecting parent has heard the old “you’d better catch up on sleep!” chestnut, delivered by well-meaning assholes in the months leading up to your kid’s birthday, and every single actual parent has quickly learned that it’s total bullshit. There’s no such thing as catching up on sleep; once you lose it, it’s gone forever. Maybe you can get a little more sleep than normal every once in a while, but that doesn’t amount to much in the long run. Trust me.

Even more ridiculous is the idea that you can somehow “bank” sleep. Hate to break it to you but you absolutely can not store rest for later. You are not a squirrel gathering acorns to ration out during the long winter (nor are you a bear gorging on food to survive hibernation; those extra pounds will not melt off anymore, I’m sorry to say!).

There’s simply no way to prepare your body for those middle-of-the-night feedings or early morning wake-ups during the infant stage, or the middle-of-the-night wakeups during sleep regression, or the early morning wakeups during every single day for the first 5+ years of your kids’ lives, or the inconvenient weekend wakeups when you’re dying to sleep in, or the late nights when you’re helping your high schooler finish some last-minute project he procrastinated for weeks, or the even later nights when you’re terrified your college kid won’t make it home and even when he does you can’t fall back to sleep.

For all the joys of parenting (I don’t discuss them much but I’ve probably mentioned one or two at some point?) and all the profound ways it changes your outlook and your perspective (that’s redundant but what can I tell you: I’m exhausted!) and your priorities, it also changes your body. And I’m not even a mom! Or in the throes of perimenopause! (Godspeed, ladies. And their husbands.) I’m just a sad, weak little man.

I don’t know that I’ve felt well-rested in 15 years (I’ll give you one guess at my oldest’s age), and to make matters worse, at some point I crossed the Rubicon into middle age and suddenly my fatigue hit a new level. And it’s really cramping my style.

We all need time to ourselves, and while I keep getting told to embrace early mornings as my quiet time (I’m not that old!), I remain more of a night owl. Like many parents, my late nights often serve as the only respite after a day spent at someone’s beck and call. Some of us get touched out, some of us get “Mom! Dad! Mom! Dad!”-ed out, some of us just want an opportunity to watch the sociopaths of “Industry” do blow and get pegged. Whatever the reason, I (and Mom and Buried as well) prefer to do that after everyone else has gone to sleep.

When I can manage it, that is. Sadly, it’s getting harder and harder to manage.

Like competency in the White House, my stamina has completely disappeared. I used to scoff at parents who couldn’t get through a movie without falling asleep; I have one friend who would split a flick over three nights and he’s been dead to me for years. As a self-proclaimed movie buff, his desecration of the experience makes my blood boil. And then I myself turned some kind of corner into AARP-ville and had to concede that sometimes finding a suitable stopping point midway through the latest Oscar nominee is the only way to get through it without sleeping through the third act. (Such a concession notwithstanding, I maintain that splitting a movie over any more than two nights remains blasphemous, and that my former friend Tim should be ashamed of himself.)

At 10 and 15, my kids are mostly past the age of before-sunrise wakeups, though my 10yo still rarely sleeps past 7, and seems destined to be a dreaded morning person. But that hardly registers any more. Like I said, I’ve crossed some kind of invisible barrier, and it’s forcing me to change my lifestyle for the worse, forcing me to succumb to an earlier bedtime.

So my 10yo had better get ready for some more sophisticated screentime, because I may lose my late nights, but they’ll never take my TV-MA!

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