A DAD'S LIFE:IT'S BEEN nearly 11 years now I've been chasing sleep. Coveting it like Brad Pitt's life. Sleep has become a grail, something occasionally glimpsed, experienced on rare occasions in depth, but usually a fleeting reminder of all those teenage summer holiday hours when midday would flit by, disregarded because it was far too early for anything.
It’s easy when the kids are babies. It’s like Monday, or January. You’re psyched for it, expecting it to be difficult. Babies sleep when they know you’re awake so they can enthral you with charming gurgles and bodily fluid projection in the wee hours.
Somewhere in the ether, in the transcendental sphere of souls, where we wait to be born again, there is a compulsory class which insists that when we get back to earth it is our moral imperative to spend the first two years of our lives only conscious at biologically awkward moments. And as we grow older and begin to interact, we forget this place and this class and fall into line with natural bodily rhythms, thus allowing ourselves to integrate into the world, and our parents to regain a semblance of lives.
By two years of age, sleep patterns should have stabilised. Apart from the odd bout of illness, a child should kip through the night and parents should have reverted to a solid eight hours of shut-eye. This small mercy enables them to go about their lives in a productive and happy manner.
You’d think so. So why is it normal for me to be standing in the kitchen, staring blankly out the window, clutching a mug of warm milk at 4am.
I remember those teenage sleeps. I remember those summer holidays when all that mattered was hanging with your mates, chasing girls, conning your parents you were watching a video when really there was a party in Bray and you were cycling 12 miles to get there with a jam jar of mixed spirits stolen from the drinks cabinet warming your parka pocket. Sleep wasn’t an issue then. It came when you fell into bed, exhausted from another day’s attempts to convince someone to kiss you. And it lasted long into the next.
Work was the first thing to eat into this rhythm. Getting up at an unnatural hour to be somewhere at eight or nine. All this after shunning any morning activities for years through college. Work cursed the natural imperative to wake only when refuelling had occurred. And then, for some reason, as bodies become accustomed to the daily toil and wringing as much as humanly possible from the two days of freedom that bookend the working week, the natural inclination to spawn reared its head. The average age in modern times to start a family is in the early 30s. We’ve left our antagonistic youth behind, we’ve accepted the theft of the rest of our lives in order to service self-inflicted debt, so we presume that now must be the time to breed.
And only then do we realise the luxury we have handed over: the potential velvety 10 hours when we may close our eyes and nothing and nobody will think to interfere before they flutter open, like a butterfly’s wing, once again.
We know it’s gone those first two years. When the baby squalls we answer, and the baby squalls a lot. What we don’t know, on signing our sleeping lives away, is that the body forgets.
In the past 11 I’ve learned to sleep first three, then four, in a bed. I’ve become accustomed to fitfully nodding on with limbs and appendages inserted into my facial orifices. I have been vomited on, wiped it off and slumbered through. I developed the ability to change nappies and sheets, mop brows and whisper soothing words, all without regaining full consciousness.
Now my night-time demands are few. But those years of being pulled out of bed on a string have taken their toll; the body is suspicious of prolonged rest. Six hours in a row! You’ve got to be kidding.
So here I am, mug of warm milk in hand, wondering will there be anything innovative on the shopping channel. Trying to avoid conceding that that may be it for the night, knowing fatigue will hit in the hour before everyone else wakes. They’ll need me on my game then. They need me conscious. Always at least a little bit conscious.