I have a little insomnia lately. That’s never happened before. I go to bed at the usual time (10pm) and curl into the warm spot Dave has been saving for me. I am tired but I can’t sleep. Simon and Tess both make a lot of nighttime noise, which can be aggravating, and sometimes that gives me the giggles.
Simon it seems has inherited the intensity of lucid dreaming that runs in the family. He whimpers in his dreams, unable to wake up sometimes. More than once I have gone into his room to soothe him and I end up laying there listening to the mumbled threads of his dreams. I wait for the moment that my voice can enter his consciousness with a ‘Let Simon have a turn’ (if in his dream he has been waiting too long) or a ‘I’ll turn the music up for you’ (the other night he was crying because he couldn’t ‘hear the music’). He settles immediately when I say something to this effect. Just now, a second ago, I had to break from this blogging to go and wake him up from a dream in which he was fighting someone. He was thrashing his comforter about loudly until he found I had woken him and then he curled back up and fell back into his dream.
Once in the car, Sammy and I were having a question and answer session about God. “Why is God a man?” Sammy wanted to know. I’m driving so my answers are scattered and I’m trying to piece together some reply along the lines of how God is not a person but we attribute qualities of a person to ‘him’, which includes gender, and because we live in a patriarchal society then blah blah blah. And Simon pipes up in the back, saying that he knows that God is a Woman. We all want to know how Simon can be so sure and he says “Because God talks to me at night in my dreams and she is a woman.”
Ok, now back to the things that give me insomnia and make me giggle. Tess says silly things in her sleep like “Hello. Hello. Hello. Babydoll.” And then goes back to sleep. That makes me laugh. And then my mind starts to ramble about everywhere but sleepy land. I try and focus on the spot below my nose, feel my breath go in and out. I try and feel my toes relax so much I can’t feel them there anymore and then slowly move up my body. But my concentration is shot. Maybe it is the afternoon coffee, or the cookies with my evening tea, but something propels me away from rest and I become increasingly anxious as I watch the time melting away unproductively.
So here I am, past my bedtime, rudely run out my flannel and memory foam nest with some urgent blog thread running through my mind. Something about the birdfeeders out the kitchen window that we all love. The birds come and go and we only know some of the proper names, like the flocks of tiny Chickadees or the Anna’s Hummingbird that we saw for the first time on the day Tess was born. Sometimes Blue Jays, but we call them Babies for some reason. Another bird we call the Cranberry. There is a dramatic Hawk that will pause on the birdbath, shocking and large and so unlike these sunflower seed addicts we find irresistible. There is a flicker, who nests in a stag in the backyard with its screaming babies in the spring (whose fuzzy heads poke out so we can watch the mama feed them).
But right now the birdfeeders are empty. Even the fat squirrels have abandoned their acrobatic twisting leaps from sagging branch to ledge of feeder. Not even a footprint of a raccoon in the dirt floor. Even the birdbath is empty now, except for a metal dump truck filled with ‘Bird Soup’ made by my boys who used sticks to squish red berries into mush and mix it with the schwaggy last sip of my Smart Water.
I wish that I could empty my head into those feeders, now. I would gladly trade this sack of thoughts for a good night sleep.
