Esther McCarthy: Sleep is for the weak — so women get none
Esther McCarthy. Picture: Emily Quinn
“Sleep is for the weak, Apu!”
We’ve used that line a lot since the kids came along.
It’s a line from (season 7, episode 23, ‘Much Apu About Nothing’ for you nerdlingers out there) that Homer uses after Apu pleads for rest when he’s studying for a citizenship exam.
Then Homer tells Apu to work through the night while he goes to bed.
Husband and I employed it as an inside joke during the long laps around the bedroom with a colicky baby.
We said it to each other every three hours around the clock, during a scary period when our last newborn was in ICU and I was at home periodically pumping the milk, sniffing one of his babygros to try to trick my body into producing the precious milk, which husband would then deliver to the hospital.
We used it as a shortcut for ‘it’s your turn to get up’, when the teething pains outraged our babas from the land of nod to screaming consciousness.
And now, I mutter it to myself as I wake between 3am and 4am most nights, as sleep eludes me, looking at my husband sleeping, ironically, like a baby. The bastard.
Just kidding. I think.
I guess it’s not his fault. I gotta hand it to him, he’s an ideal bed mate. We’ve shared a one man tent on top of a wonky platform on a jeep for a year in Africa, instinctively turning in unison, so we wouldn’t end up falling off, easy prey for the nocturnal wanderers. Little Irish sausage rolls.
We’ve slept together in single beds with springs that were literally poking out of the mattress in India.
We spent weeks in a VW camper van in intense heat in Mexico, me with a chronic kidney infection that went untreated because I was too thrifty to pay the price of doctors in Hawaii where we’d spent the previous months, crashing on a sofa in a shared house where a tree came in through the roof above us one night. Didn’t stop us getting our eight hours.
We even slept soundly in a B&B in Co Kerry once. Imagine! Fearless, we were.
I used to pride myself on my ability to fall asleep anywhere, easily, taking for granted that ‘certain knot of peace’, that ‘soft embalmer of the still midnight’.
Now I’m spoilt with a super-king memory mattress that I think was a finalist in , pillows that regulate temperature specifically designed for side sleepers, a smart mask that has a lavender scent pouch and mirrors your circadian rhythm and possibly pays your taxes for you, yet here I am again, 3.35am, staring into the abyss, wide awake.
Husband doesn’t even snore. If he does give an odd snort, I just nudge him and he turns over and resumes normal breathing.
But why NOW? When all the kids are finally sleeping through the night. We had a few months when I had to get up with the puppy back in 2020, but tonight, there is no reason for me to be awake!
The kids are old enough for me not to worry about their nocturnal routines.
No more meerkating if I hear them murmuring or getting up for the toilet. When did that stop again? I can’t remember. My brain isn’t retrieving information properly.
That’s the thing with lack of zees, it befuddles you. And what have I been doing to combat it, in those dark, lonely hours?
My arm inevitably snakes out to reach for my phone for a bit of research. And the internet says, ‘Avoid screens! Your brain will think it’s time to wake up.’
But now my brain has read this and agrees, then forces me down a rabbit hole of online sleep research.
It’s all about cortisol levels, says one site. It’s stress, says another. It’s your hormones. It’s too little magnesium/too much caffeine.
It’s your brain trying to process all the things on your invisible To Do list. It’s your bladder (hmm, it is still a bit dodge after that Mexico trip).
It’s alcohol, says a clip from a podcast where the expert says something like, ’Alcohol is sleep’s kryptonite’. Yikers.
To be honest, I’ve been slugging down a couple of glasses of wine of a night — hey it was Christmas, then New Year and now January. But it’s nothing major, we’re talking two glasses in the evening kind of carry on.
I try giving that up for a while. It makes no difference to the sleep, but watching for the 200th time with the young fella is more of a drag.
(Man, that movie is problematic, wine-free me whined about all the creepy misogyny and stereotypes and blatant jingoism and flag-flying propaganda until the kid was popping the pinot for me faster than Tony Stark could say ‘Gimme a cheeseburger.’)
The internet is no good, so I do the next best thing. I put out a call on the Whatsapp groups.
Turns out there’s lots of us out there, staring at the ceiling at 3am. I am shocked by how many women aren’t getting a proper night’s sleep.
It would seem, at a certain stage of life, sleep is not just for the weak, but for the men. Why aren’t we talking about it? I’ll tell you all about it next week.
