Let's talk about SLEEP, baby

 The Good Place. Euphoria. We Were the Lucky Ones. The Bear. 

If we were playing NYT Connections, you might click on these four tiles and assume the thread binding them together is "Titles of TV Shows." In the game of my life -- and I know I'm not alone in this -- these words and phrases mean something completely different:

Bed. Sleep. Life before perimenopause. Me in the mornings before coffee.

It used to drive Nick crazy that my head could hit the pillow and within minutes I'd be out. It used to terrify me when our children were small and cribbed that I would sleep through a call in the night or, worse yet, the house catching on fire. Although I never lost sleep over it.

I will often still fall asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow -- after I've taken 480mg of magnesium, 100mg of progesterone, 60mg of Qulipta, 365mg of Omega 7s, and two Gaia "Sleep Thru" capsules, finished all my daily NYT games (IYKYK), taken off my glasses, put one over-ear Beat earphone in my non-sleeping-side left ear, turned off the lamp, lay on my back and breathed through a Headspace Sleepcast, then turned onto my right side with a podcast on 30-minute "sleep." After that, I'm usually out for at least a couple of hours.

Until my bladder, my sweat glands, or my brain decides otherwise.

@momsbehavingbadly

None of this is unique to me. Women have written about it, memed about it, blogged about it, cried about it... But something happened this morning that was slightly different.

When I woke up, the clock didn't start with a 1, 2, 3, or 4.

The clock showed 5:59. 5:59!

And I wasn't thinking about all the work I didn't get done yesterday, or the really hard conversation I need to have with my parents this afternoon, or the fact that they are going to leave me with four storage units full of antiques they cannot bear to part with and WHAT. THE. F*<% am I going to do with those?, or whether my son received the package that was supposed to have been delivered yesterday, or even knows how to get packages delivered to the mail room at his college, or what time I need to leave on Friday to arrive at my daughter's campus for the Family Weekend events, or whether I need to do laundry between now and then, or where is my rain slicker in case it pours on us at the football game like it did two years ago, or whether the boundaries I've set in my life are appropriate or selfish, or why I was raised to think that doing anything to protect myself actually is selfish, or about the time I told Beth T. in 8th grade that I didn't want to be her friend anymore and then saw her 20 years later at the Soda Shoppe and still didn't have the guts to apologize in person... 

I am so sorry, Beth. You were absolutely right -- you had done nothing but try to be my friend, and it was a really bitchy thing to say.

Nope, I wasn't thinking about any of that. Instead I was thinking about coming back to this very page to write something. And because being here was the only thing I did differently last night -- that, and watch the first two episodes of FX's "English Teacher" (So far, no notes. Highly recommend.) -- I'm assuming that correlation = causation and that writing this stupid blog is good for my stupid mental health.

Because instead of lying in bed angry about not sleeping (or the myriad other things in the world that really get my blood boiling), I got up, took 2 multivitamins and a probiotic, 300mg of Wellbutrin, 100mg of CoQ10, and 15mg of L-Methylfolate, made coffee, and... well... the rest, as they say, is (browser) history.

Screw you, Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Do you have to be right all the damn time? Just kidding. I love you both so much. Don't ever stop writing or researching or singing.