An appeal from the author Why you should become a Salon member. By Anne Lamott

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T A B L E++T A L K

Single moms discuss the good, the bad and the ugly of raising kids solo in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

One mother's gain
By Maurine Zarlengo Christ
After adopting three children, a mom says it's love, not blood, that makes parents
(01/06/99)

My mother's daughter
By Kristina Zarlengo
A child of adoption wonders: How much is my nature a product of my nurturing?
(01/05/99)

The baby girl I gave away
By Ceil Malek
Putting up a baby for adoption was the first act of my adult life, but it took me almost 30 years to face what that decision meant for me and my daughter
(01/04/99)

Millennial family values
By Stephanie Coontz
The legislators who are piously "voting their conscience" have been consistently screwing the future for our children
(12/24/98)

The last waltz
By Anne Lamott
A dying woman calls her community together to thank it, to say goodbye -- and to dance
(12/23/98)

BROWSE THE WORD BY WORD ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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Salon Columnists

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BY ANNE LAMOTT | No one tells you the really interesting stuff when you're pregnant. No one tells you, for instance, that your life is effectively over: that you're never going to draw another complacent breath again, and that the terror of losing your child arrives within 20 minutes of first seeing his or her face. No one mentions that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you'd learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days about three weeks after your baby's arrival. There are good things they don't tell you, too, like how vibrational new babies are, how healing they are when they sleep on your chest, how you let out your breath and rest down into them and are set free of everything bad for just a moment. No one prepares you for how much joyousness babies elicit in you, in awful finicky old you, what unexpected capacities for twinkliness and softness and courage. But then again, no one tells you that sometimes you won't even like your child. Or that you are going to discover streaks of self-obsession and neuroses that make your crabby Aunt Nancy look like Meher Baba. No one, while discussing parenthood, ever mentions the word "pathological." Or "The Zone," a place of held-breath twilight terror when you can't locate your child. So when our children got bigger and we looked back at our expectations -- the Gerber commercial moments, the slow-motion footage on beaches and carousels, the TV sitcom moments of adorable mischief and softhearted exasperation, it's no wonder we decompensated into hysterical laughter. It's no wonder the tears streamed down our faces.

Because on top of everything else, on top of the Gerber moments playing side by side with cancer scares, the slow-motion rides on the merry-go-round in a double bill with your child missing at Safeway, there was a tiredness beyond all imagining. It's like the last day of a speed binge, but about half the time. It's almost like combat exhaustion, the all-nighters with a sick kid, with a colicky infant or a toddler with an ear infection at midnight; a grind-'em-up endgame battle, the third day of the Battle at Gettysburg with Gen. Pickett relentlessly charging the Union soldiers. You are the fixed line of Union soldiers; unrelenting neediness is the Confederate general.

Now, I'm an intelligent woman and I understood that having a child was not going to improve a lifetime of poor sleep. But I had been led to believe that maybe for the first year or so you're up every few hours in the middle of the night, but after that you're only up when they're croupy, or have a nightmare.

This sense of short-term tiredness turns out not to be the case.

I'd been sleeping poorly long before I had a child. I always had trouble drifting off, and whenever I needed to get up early -- school, jobs, etc. -- I went through the day feeling vaguely hungover. But usually if I couldn't fall asleep, I could at least make up for it by sleeping in. I wasn't able to consistently fall asleep before midnight until I discovered barbiturates in my early 20s, although "fall asleep" is perhaps a misnomer. Let's say they caused awareness to end. Sometimes I was so drunk when I took a sleeping pill that boyfriends would say incredulously that I would be in a vegetative coma by morning, drool trickling down the sides of my mouth, but I'd think, "Gee, you make that sound like a bad thing."

So nine years ago I had this beautiful child, and we survived colic and ear infections and croup and fevers, and after that first erratic year he was one of those kids who would sleep in. I couldn't believe my good fortune, that he was not one of those early risers who want to bound out of bed at 6 a.m. and begin a new day. I really cannot stand that in a child. Often I stay up writing until quite late at night, and then I'm unable to fall asleep until 2 or 3 or 4. So I've always needed to sleep a bit in order to function. The difference between having to get up at 7 and 8 is -- besides an hour -- the difference between bloodshot flu symptoms and just feeling a little tired. A little tired I can do; it's actually one of the things I do best. I found a preschool that started at 9, and a little Christian kindergarten that started at 9. Then, miraculously, it turned out that the public school where he has gone since first grade had a Late Bird/Early Bird schedule through third grade, and Late Birds did not start till 9:15.

So all those years, if I had a horrific night of insomnia, I could at least sleep until just before 8, and Sam would sleep too, and we'd get up and have a relatively dopey morning together, which was great.

But this year he started fourth grade, and all the fourth graders are Early Birds. I guess it's good for them to get up nice and early in preparation for the factory jobs they'll no doubt hold one day. So I started getting up at 6:45 to turn on the heat and make a pot of coffee for me and a cup of cocoa for Sam, and have a few moments of quiet before having to get Sam up, fed and dressed. It was so disappointing to lose that languid quality of our first nine years together that I almost considered home schooling, or plugging Sam into some existing hippie spiritual survivalists out in the valley, or maybe a nice Christian militia group that started at 9. But Sam loves his friends at school and has had fantastic teachers every step of the way, and I believe in public school and know it's where we're supposed to be.

N E X T_ P A G E: Some of the world's worst people are some of the best sleepers

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