butterfly baby

i had a wonderful dream the other night.  as i was talking with two of my long-time friends, a big colorful butterfly began circling us.  it landed on my finger and sat there for a minute.  as the butterfly took off again, i noticed it was actually my little girl, lily.  she was fat and naked with huge butterfly wings and she flew in circles around our heads.

celebrate in motion

Insomnia nights are long, lonely and hard. Usually, they start when one of my girls wakes me up with a cry in the dark, needing something. A drink of water, an escort to the bathroom, some comfort from a nightmare. I hear them calling me from deep down inside the well of my sleep. Sometimes I can surface easily, but other times it actually hurts to wake up, depending on how tired I am, how much I gave away the day before. On those worn-out nights, I feel a flush of anger and grind my teeth as I stumble down the dark hall in my pajamas. My dentist thinks I need to wear a $400 night guard.

Once the kids are soothed, I climb back into bed, shut my eyes and wait. I watch as my mind creeps over to those favorite painful topics I visit like a loose tooth, giving things a little wiggle to see if they still hurt. A nasty fight, a painful memory, some family gossip. My job hunt, our laundry mountain, the climate crisis. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, these stories take a psychedelic turn and start to unravel. Words jump off of paper and fly away like birds or someone rolls away on roller skates. All happy signs that sleep is coming. I relax and then it’s morning.

But once I start writing letters to the editor in my head, I know I’m done for. I sigh deeply and turn on the light. I watch my husband, Sean, sprawled out and snoring next to me. I creep out of the room to check on our youngest daughter dreaming in her blue plastic race car bed. She’s asleep; little pout, round baby face, arms flung gracefully over her head. I creep back into my bed and watch my oldest daughter sleep on the “nightmare nest” air mattress next to our bed; her cheeks almost too rosy, mouth open, breathing deeply, clutching her teddy bear. I spin around in bed and worry about getting through the morning. These nights seem like what it might be like to die, longingly watching others simply engaging in the business of life. My sleeping family is going places I can’t follow; a green field, a gentle brook, a sweet smell on a cool breeze. Me, I’m on the outside looking in, my face smashed up against the window; industrial rust, grinding gears, a painful glare in the sky. I’m jealous. I’m tired. I want to go too.

Another twenty minutes pass. I grab a book from the huge, precariously-stacked queue I’ve quickly and randomly purchased for this very moment. Boring, fact-based nonfiction works best, but lately I’ve been reading memoirs written by women about their troubled youth. Once children raised by free-love hippies and drug dealers in jail, parents who put their own needs first. These abandoned kids became troubled teenagers engaging in their own memoir-worthy dramas. These stories are soothing to me in the middle of the night, make me feel better about my own interrupted dreams.

Last night at three in the morning, I dug through my stack and found Alice Munro’s book of short stories called “Runaway”. I cracked it open and was completely lost in a trilogy of stories about a woman named Juliet. In the first story, she is young, unexpectedly falling in love with a man on a train. In the next story, she is happy with this man and their new baby, Penelope. In the last story, many years have passed and Juliet is now alone. The man she loved is gone and her beloved daughter, now a grown woman with a family of her own, doesn’t want anything to do with her.

In the middle of the night, these stories were deeply moving, haunting, downright devastating. They activated all my deepest themes. Time, Life, Love, Loss, Death. My own life was fast-forwarding, all my worst fears coming true . . . my kids weren’t talking to me, my husband was gone, my old lady life was in shambles. My heart was racing and my eyes were wide open. Bad material for an insomniac.

Totally exhausted, emotional, freaking out, I climbed out of bed yet again. This time, I carefully picked my little sleeping daughter up and tucked her into our bed. I needed to put my arm around her and hold her close, to feel her hot little furnace body next to mine. Our girl snuggled between us, I breached the well-established boundary of my husband’s sleep and woke him up.

I told Sean I couldn’t sleep because this – wildly gesturing around the dark room – was all so temporal, that maybe someday the girls wouldn’t want to talk to me, that someday we would all be dead and gone. Groggy, Sean lifted his head from the pillow to look bleary and cross-eyed at me. “Well,” he said, “that’s why you have to celebrate it in motion.” And then he turned over and went back to sleep. I held tight to my child and listened to her breath intermingle with my husband’s breath, both of them whispering, “We are here. We are here. We are here.”