Elisa’s Day

since i had babies and started driving again ( the ten years before i had babies i had no car and never drove )  i have had 3 minor accidents. one actual collision and two fender bender type deals, one in a parking lot and one in my own driveway. i have always blamed the “mommy brain” but ryan just thinks i’m a bad driver.

i read an interesting article in national geographic about sleep just last week. it was mostly about how little they really understand sleep, why we do it, why we need it. all they really know for sure is that we do. if we don’t sleep we die. there was a lot of type dedicated to sleep disorders like narcolepsy and apnea. and not a single sentence to all us mothers out there.

the one sentence that resonated with me is this ( paraphrasing ) “staying awake for 24 hours, or getting less the 5 hours for 5 nights in a row is the equivalent of having a blood alcohol level of 0.1″ well, dude, every single mother i know ( with the exception of maybe 2 ) gets less sleep then that.  i haven’t gotten more then 5 straight hours of sleep a night in, what, 9 years…..of course that isn’t entirely true, there are nights i get more sleep, but no doubt averaged out with the ones i only get to sleep an hour at a time and hey, it’s about right. so i guess it really is a fucking miracle i function as well as i do then. which i have been telling ryan for years, maybe now he’ll actually believe me a little more.

it really is true though. the kind of clouded head, the inability to remember anything and be distracted by everything……. that is how i feel a lot of the time. and i try very hard to consciously focus when doing things like operating a vehicle, but one slip in concentration is all it takes. and don’t even get me started on all the minor bits and pieces…..every sink almost over flowed, every pot boiled dry, every load of laundry i go back to find dry in the washer or wet in the dryer because they got put in but not turned on.

why we’re unrecognized i don’t know. because we choose to have kids? i guess. because there is some miracle sleep training method out there that if we’d just submit to, we’d be rocking our 9 hours like everyone else? yeah…..right…… well i have to say that sleep training only works in some cases anyway. no matter what method you’re trying. some babies and kids just don’t sleep well. and if they don’t sleep well, you don’t sleep well. they could have dedicated even one paragraph to those of us, the exhausted masses.

i’d wager a guess that motherhood outnumbers all other sleep disorders.