Overhaul

I have crazy insomnia lately. I haven’t been able to get to sleep before 3 am in almost a week.

Olive goes down around 10, and I spend the next five hours or so writing, tidying, and just lying here, trying to quiet my mind enough to rest.

I thought that maybe my schedule had just become switched, like it used to in university. I’d been staying up late to pack and write uninterrupted, then bringing O to bed with me in the morning to get a little more sleep.

It was blissful and ridiculous at the same time. I love sleeping with her socked into the little nook of my armpit, yawning and still in our PJ’s at 10 or 11am – but then the day is half gone, and who sleeps in until 11am with a baby?

So the past few days I tried to switch my schedule back, getting UP up with Olive when she wakes at 8 or 7:30 or 6:45. Our days have been longer, and fuller but it hasn’t changed anything for me. Here I am, still churning at 1:30am. It’s not productive time, it feels aimless and wasted. I don’t want to be trying to get stuff done, I want to sleep.

I don’t do very well with change, even when that change is long-awaited and eagerly anticipated. It makes me feel anxious and unsettled. Rootless.

I run through a million to-do lists, and find myself leaping out of bed to write things down “Cancel gas. Find out about mail forwarding. Talk to Anita about mortgages. Book RRSP appointment. Get oil change. Put together going away party. Get Gus’s rabies shots.”

It seems endless. But then the next day I sit and look at the list and don’t know where to start. And the sun sets again and the list grows and I lie here thinking and listening to the soft breathing of Olive in her crib, and the light snores of Adam beside me, and Gus downstairs having a dream where he’s running.

I need routine.I hate routine. But I need to get better at setting one and following one, I know that it will be helpful for Olive to be able to have consistency in her days. I have to admit that part of me thought that this would just happen when I had a baby. I would be forced to wake up early and go to bed early and we wouldn’t be able to just spend whole days wandering around the city or lazing around in bed or eating out at restaurants, we’d be forced to adapt.. 

But of course, that hasn’t happened at all. O is so accommodating  and she’s had our schedule from the start. She loves wandering. She loves to snuggle into me and sleep. She is the perfect dinner date.

With each new change in my life I expect to become someone different, graduating university, getting married, having a baby. I expected each new change to change me. But it hasn’t, not really. The core of me is the same, and I mean, that’s a good thing, I’m not looking for a personality overhaul or something.

But it doesn’t help when I’m lying here awake. Thinking. As usual.