I Haven’t Slept in Almost Two Decades

“Are you sleeping yet?”

This is normally one of the first things I ask new mothers, because it’s a universal question. It’s one I’d even ask new fathers, if pressed towards it, though that’s where the interrogation typically begins to divide.

“It gets better,” I like to promise anyone in the Survival Years.

(This is the first photo I found on my phone of the 3 of us… and it was taken in January. So that’s not very encouraging.)

We think infancy is the hardest. Then they become mobile and we’ve never been so tired. We can’t sit down on a vacation ever again - everything is a race to intervene. Between traffic, bodies of water, electrical outlets, strangers, large displays of items to which we’d be liable. Sometimes even yourself.

“Oh no, that’s me,” we think as they mirror our worst qualities. (“I shoulda fixed that first.”)

It does get better, that part is true, but the sleeping never fully returns. “Awake?” my eldest texts from her flip phone at 1 AM from downstairs, as she’s stressed about life’s worries and worrying about stressors in life that some may never know.

I’m always awake.

I haven’t slept in almost two decades.

Every school shooting, or pile up on the freeway, or newly diagnosed something is a comet hurtling towards our one true love (or loves, in my instance), and we are the shield, permanently worrying about how to put ourselves between their body and the Great Big Worry.

This Mother’s Day, I’m watching a momma most deserving who cannot prevent the Great Big. Who would throw her body in the way again and again, and still… her human shield can’t stop this one. If it could, she would have already.

“It gets better,” I say, but the truth of this, to every Dear Momma or Parent raising a Dear One on this day of days, isn’t true at all. The only real hope we should have on this day is not mid-morning brunches. Or for someone to rub our feet. Or for cards that weren’t bought frantically 2 hours before because the entire unit forgot. But to just lay with the sweet bliss of worrying for our babies. For as long as we get. For all the 1 AM texts.

“Are you sleeping yet?” We ask.

To which, I long to say: “Hopefully, I never do.”

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