Every Valentine's Day since eighth grade, my childhood friend and I have written each other a poem. This tradition began because at age 14, we weren't…well, let's just say we weren't attracting a lot of admirers. The annual round of junior-high "flower-grams"—dye-dipped carnations with drippy love notes that accumulated on certain girls' desks—rather passed us by. So, we penned our own love notes and presented them to each other with discarded, hallway-trampled purple carnations.
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Now, 24 years later, our poem exchange has become one of my favorite rituals. Our Valentines have run the gamut from absurd, over-the-top odes to serious poems about love, children, heartache, loss and correspondence. They've come in the form of haikus built from alphabet cookies, adjective-emblazoned paper hearts and couplet sets in fancy script with elaborate curlicues.
I had been looking forward to creating this year's Valentine. I mused on metaphors walking Theo to preschool and whispered in iambic pentameter to lull Sylvia to sleep. In my stolen writing time, I chose my café carefully, found the perfect table, sipped dark coffee, conjured loving thoughts and flexed my fingers. I wrote two poems! Both of which are about…insomnia! They are actually fairly dark and not really love poems at all, but I can't seem to write about anything else.
I once was a really superb and exceptionally deep sleeper. It never occurred to me that people might not be able to sleep, especially me. Even in the throes of a failing romance when I would go so far as to lose my appetite (a rare occasion), my sound nights' sleep usually remained intact. I had little sympathy even for family members who had difficulty sleeping: "Just, you know, go to sleep," I helpfully counseled. The possibility of me being of a full-fledged insomniac was simply off my radar. And then I had children.
My initial fear of sleeping through a baby's cries was ameliorated by my confidence in my light-sleeping husband. I quickly found, of course, that I needn't rely on his responsiveness. Already I had discovered my own capacity for shallow sleep with the helpful aid of pregnancy-induced leg cramps and hip pain. But the insomnia overriding my Valentine's tradition is not that kind.
Recently it lasted for two consecutive nights, broken only by a sliver of doze between 3:30 and 6:00 each morning. Ironically, these were nights when we were visiting my parents and the kids slept soundly even though they were in unfamiliar beds. I just wandered around, actively not sleeping, and listened to the thundering sound of deep-sleep breathing coming from every other person in my once-somnolent childhood home.
It is a cruel perversion of karmic justice wherein I, the official Putter-To-Bed of two children, can't get my own self to sleep. Why?! I know so many lullabies! And, yet, even singing all of them to myself at 2 am doesn't help.
I also have tried the following and more—often all in one night:
lying on my right side; lying on my left; lying on my back; eye drops; lip balm; moving to a different bed; moving to the couch; lying on the floor; adho mukha svanasana; milk; cinnamon toast; homeopathic sleeping aids; herbal sleeping aids; slugs of Irish whiskey; reading Tina Fey; reading The Economist; imagining releasing bad thoughts through my fingertips and toes with each exhalation and imagining absorbing quiet good with each inhalation; unplugging the clock; looking at the clock on my cell phone; flinging said cell phone across the room; looking out the window; realizing the dog will bark if I go outside; waking up my husband; rolling my head against the wall; crying; not being able to cry.
During my last bout of insomnia, I laid awake in an exhausted and angry stupor thinking, "I should get up. I should be productive during this time. I should write the Valentine's poem!" But I was too tired. I didn't get up, I wasn't productive; and while I tried to write the Valentine's poem in my head, I really just crystallized a significant number of insomnia metaphors. Given this, it's no surprise that this year's Valentine attempts turned out to be stanza'ed meditations on the weirdness of not sleeping.
Mothers of older children assure me that I will one day sleep again. Other mothers, my own included, confess to never having a good night's sleep—a thought so terrible that I don't yet accept it as a credible fate. When I do sleep, I love it in a way I never knew when it came easily. And this turn on love—the quivery, ardent desire for a night of deep sleep—informed the sonnet I eventually wrote out in magic-marker on a paper doily for my friend.
But because we are such good friends and have been for most of our lives—and because she remembers me crashed out at a slumber party when she wasn’t, and the desert and snow camping trips when we waited anxiously for the sun to rise, as well as parenthood’s apparently infinite varieties of wakefulness—I also sent her the more complicated insomnia pieces. And now that I think about it, the fact that I could stuff the envelope with all three poems is the real Valentine.
