yes please(35)

The phrase “going to sleep” has always given me great anxiety. I don’t like doing things I am bad at, and I have been told since I was very young that I am a bad sleeper. As soon as I become prone, my head will begin to unpack. My mind will turn on and start to hum, which is the opposite of what you need when you begin to switch off. It is as if I were waiting the whole day for this moment. Trying to go to sleep is often when I feel most engaged and alive. My brain starts to trick me into thinking this is the moment it should turn on and start working overtime. It is a problem. I need some rest. I have a lot to do.

Our parents surround us with origin stories that create deep grooves in the vinyl records of our lives. Mine included the simple fact of how little I slept as a baby. My mom and dad nicknamed me “Tweety Bird” because I was a tiny not-quite-six pounds, had big eyes, and was bald until I was two. I was told I resembled a cartoon chicken, which is still true, especially after a rough weekend. My parents tell stories about my staring at them from the crib at all hours of the night. Sounds pretty creepy, right? A pale, bald, and tiny baby bird peering out through the slats of its cage, challenging the adults to an all-night staring contest? By all accounts I came home and my parents didn’t sleep again for another ten years. I was born in a different time. Women still smoked when pregnant and no one talked about folic acid. Kale wasn’t even invented yet! My mother, who was constantly nauseous, was encouraged to keep her weight down by her doctors. She gained only eighteen pounds during her pregnancy with me, a fact she was very proud of and told me repeatedly while I was pregnant for the second time and forty pounds overweight. She may have stopped after I threatened to dropkick her into the neighbor’s yard if she mentioned it again. My mother was also a tiny baby, and my grandmother (another petite flower) used to brag that she would put my mother to sleep inside a dresser drawer. It seems like in the olden times people loved to stick their babies in strange places and then brag about where they fit. My father also told me a story about using a warm baked potato as some kind of mitten. I don’t know. Things were weird back then. Whatever the case, I was small and a bad sleeper and these labels have stuck.

At a young age I would grind my teeth and snore. I sleep-laughed and sleep-talked. I didn’t sleepwalk, but I sleep-scared my brother, Greg. We would sleep in the same bed on Christmas Eve, too excited to be apart. He was three years younger and would easily fall asleep while I did my usual ritual of spending two to three hours going over lists in my head, worrying about my family, and then reading Nancy Drew books with a flashlight. One Christmas morning Greg, who was five at the time, woke me up to go downstairs. I looked at him and said, “Okay, let’s go wake up Greg.” He looked at me with his big kindergarten eyes and nervously said, “I am Greg!” From then on our family has used the phrase “I am Greg!” any time one of us is having an existential breakdown. One Christmas, when we were a bit older, Greg and I got up in the middle of the night and turned all the clocks in the house ahead a few hours. We woke up our parents and opened presents until they finally realized it was pitch-black even though the clocks read eight thirty A.M.

Sleepovers were a big thing when I was young. Sleepovers were girl summits—confabs where we all snuggled next to each other and decided who we were going to be. They were also stressful social experiments. I had two wonderful friends growing up whom I still consider my close friends. I met Kristin Umile in second grade. She was shorter than me, which was a big deal. She was half Italian and talked a mile a minute. She won the superlative “cutest” in both middle school and high school but was incredibly well liked, which gives you a sense of her wonderfulness. Andrea Mahoney, whom I called Sis, was the social quarterback of the whole school. She came from a warm Irish family with lots of older brothers and sisters, and she was a pretty athlete who made everyone feel welcome wherever we were. I was lucky to be included in that sandwich. As we would line our Snoopy sleeping bags up next to each other I would sink into the relief I felt from having friends like these girls. Smart. Patient. Good daughters and sisters. That’s who I ran with. That being said, I still went through the young-girl rites of passage, including being kicked out of the group. Almost every girl goes through this weird living nightmare, where you show up at school and realize people have grown to hate you overnight. It’s a Twilight Zone moment when you can’t figure out what is real. It is a group mind-f*ck of the highest kind, and it makes or breaks you. I got through it by keeping my head down, and a few weeks passed and all the girls liked me again. We all pretended it never happened. There should be manuals passed out to teach girls how to handle that inevitable one-week stretch when up is down and the best friend who just slept over at your house suddenly pulls your hair in front of everyone and laughs.

The nerves of suddenly being a social outcast would be enough to keep me up, as well as my terrible snoring and overall unattractive sleeping style. Ever since I was a young girl I’ve snored and drooled and slept with my mouth wide open. It wasn’t pretty, and at eleven, pretty can be important. At sleepovers I would often be the last girl standing. Everyone would fall asleep while I stared at the ceiling. Sometimes I would tiptoe around and watch everyone sleep. After tossing and turning, I would lightly snoop around and then put on my coat and sneak outside. I watched more than one sunrise in a strange suburban driveway. Then I would sleep late and wake up to an empty house and a mother who would reluctantly mix up a new batch of pancakes.