Sleep has always been something that has evaded me. At least as an adult. I was always the one up with the babies at night, mostly because I was able to stay home to take care of them, but also because I was the one who heard them. As our youngest is now ten years old, there is less need for me to keep an ear attuned for those cries in the night, and yet I rarely get an uninterrupted night’s sleep. I’ve begun to wonder if this is just one more way that my body can’t relax. I spent the better part of twenty years with an infant in our home. Was some part of me determined to quickly respond to those cries in the night because my own infant cries went unanswered at the beginning of my life? I was never one to let our babies “cry it out.” I’ll admit some of that was because I didn’t want my husband to not get enough sleep since he was the one going to work every day. But there was also a part of me that just could not not respond to their calls. I never wanted them to feel frightened and alone in the darkness. Some part of me still knows the hollowness of that feeling.
This heightened awareness has also been beneficial at times. Most recently, it has come in handy at my job as a school secretary. No two days are ever the same, and this year especially, the need to be fluid and able to function in the midst of the unknown is essential. I seem to know and have a pulse for what is going on in the building at all times. So much so that my co-secretary has jokingly called me a witch. He often exclaims, “How do you know these things?!?” My typical response is that I’ve heard the information in passing or that someone casually mentioned something, so it is on my radar. I don’t know how I know what I know. It just seems to be what I do, and not intentionally.
All this high-level multi-tasking can make a person tired, or at least run down, especially in high-stress, intense situations. My constant intake of what is happening around me is actually me being in an ever-present state of fight, flight, fawn, or freeze. I have lived the majority of my life waiting for something to happen. It’s been that way since I was born and immediately relinquished. My brain recorded and retained that lack of safety into a state of being, and I have since learned to function in it. I wonder what it would be like to completely relax and feel safe doing so? It is so foreign that I’m uncertain how to not be in an anticipatory state of response. I struggle to breathe and just be. Until I can convince my brain and body to do something different, I will continue to use my “spidey senses” as a gift, although I’m not sure that’s what it truly is.