Insomnia
Most of my ideas come to me at 4:00 in the morning. I have chronic insomnia. When I say this, I don’t mean, “I sometimes have a hard time falling asleep, but I eventually doze off,” I mean that I am prescribed medication to help me fall asleep, and it doesn’t work. I laugh in the face of 300mg of Seroquel and a little topper of Lunesta. My psychiatrist was astounded that this combination of pills didn’t even make me the least bit drowsy. At the worst of it, I’m awake for about three days straight before the buzzing in my body stops, and my brain is just sluggish enough to allow me to keep my eyes shut long enough to fall asleep. I don’t really think there’s a “best of it”, I’m just happy if I fall asleep.
It’s been like this for as long as I can remember, which unfortunately isn’t saying much, because I have a shit memory if I’m being honest. I think that this probably started as a young child’s will to stay awake until their mother came home on the weekends. My mother was a bartender…is a bartender? I don’t know, we don’t talk, I cut her off on my 30th birthday. But when I was a child, she was a bartender. This meant that she was leaving for work at the time my brother and I were coming home from school, and getting home while we were sleeping, if we were lucky. There were plenty of days that she came home as we were leaving for school. Those days are often what I remember the most, my mother coming in at 6 something in the morning, slurring her words, smelling like alcohol and cigarettes. Those mornings she usually had some snide comment to make at me, for some slight she perceived I’d made against her at some point. I never really knew what to expect when Marie came home drunk.
I guess I should mention that my mother wasn’t the only adult in the house. She had a long-time boyfriend; his name was Corey. He, like my mother, was an alcoholic. I don’t remember what he did for work, I know at one point before we moved to Alabama he worked in asbestos removal, but after we moved here? I have no idea. I do know that he usually left for work around the time we left for school, or maybe a little after, and got home around 5 or 6 at night. As soon as Corey got home, there was a Rolling Rock in his hand. I remember those green glass bottles; I always thought the color was so pretty. I was so proud of myself when they taught me how to use a bar tool to open their beers. I loved to go get them another one whenever they asked. I was probably ten or eleven at the time. But even that memory is tainted because this was a skill that I should not have been taught, or a task made to fulfill, but it was put on me regardless. Because of this, whenever my mother was a little too far in her drinks, she would chastise me for being so eager to get them drinks, claiming that I was trying so hard to be “grown”, mocking me for trying to be an “adult”.
So, even when I was wary of our relationship, I still craved it. My brother and I on Friday and Saturday nights would stay up until the early morning hours waiting for her to come home, to be able to spend some time with her. We would listen to CDs through our DVD player and play board games until easily four or five in the morning. It was usually the Friends trivia game (it was her favorite tv show), Rummy, or Scrabble. I often got yelled at for playing all my cards too quickly to win the game in Rummy or not being able to make as complex words as the rest of my family in Scrabble. Years later when I brought it up to her that these scolding sessions would happen, she denied ever yelling at me over something so silly. I might not remember much of my childhood, but I remember all the reasons I was yelled at or made to feel small. But Marie is never wrong, so it obviously never happened.
When game nights happened my mother and Corey would drink beer after beer and shot after shot. So how the night ended was always a toss-up between two options: we all decided we were tired at some point and went to bed without incident or my mom and Corey would get so drunk that a fight would end up breaking out. Who it was between was always the unknown component. Often it would start as a fight between my mother and Corey, and it would get so heated that my brother, Robbie, and I would intervene to protect our mother. Standing up for her, consoling her, getting in between the two of them literally. This would then paint a target on us, and Corey would start in on one of us, which then in turn caused my mother to come back in yelling to defend us. It was a sick cycle. I, for a long time, thought fights like this between family members was normal, and that every household did it.
The fights always felt like they lasted forever, it seemed like because of their cyclical nature that it would never end. An endless loop of yelling and crying. These fights would frequently leave me hyperventilating, this weird hiccupping, gasping kind of crying that I couldn’t calm myself down from. On nights when it was the adults against the kids? Marie would hone in on this “weakness” of mine. I was quick to cry when met with uncomfortable situations, being yelled at, being angry, being scared, any kind of confrontational state, honestly, brought me to tears. She would get up in my face and mimic the noises I was making as I tried to regulate and calm down, she usually made it worse.
The relief for the fight to finally end, to be able to make my way to my bedroom, shut the door behind me, and close myself off from everyone that just brought my whole psyche to a stall? It’s a feeling that I always seemed to fall deep into. It felt like something hollowed me out, and I was just a shell falling into my bed. I would wrap myself up tightly in my blankets, feel the final sobs wrack my body, and I could finally close my eyes against their burning. The hiccupping would slow, and my breathing would finally find a rhythm, and then I was gone.
I guess it’s not that surprising that I’m an insomniac now, between forcing myself to stay awake to spend time with my mother and unintentionally conditioning myself that falling asleep can only follow the most mentally exhausting, wearing down of my body. Now, the only way to recreate that exhaustion is through just being awake for days. I guess I should be glad that I don’t exist in those conditions anymore, and I am, but I wish I could retrain my brain as to what an appropriate bedtime routine is.
