We meet in the middle of the night like clandestine lovers, creeping down a dark stairwell, careful to avoid waking the littlest household members, who would surely intervene. We speak in tender whispers, or hurt ones. We vent, review, inform, apologize, share, and repent before the sun rises. The television room%uFFFDsmall, womblike, and farthest from the stairs%uFFFDis our preferred rendezvous spot, but if it’s too cluttered, the living room will do. On either couch, we run the risk of getting a My Little Pony up the butt, but we’re willing to overlook such details. We need these early morning hours, so we take them, however we have to, whenever we can.%uFFFD
From 9 A.M. to 3 P.M. every day I’m a writer and a teacher. From 3 P.M. to 9 P.M. I’m a mother to two girls. I’m too exhausted by their bedtime to be much of anything to anyone else, but after just three or four hours’ sleep, I wake with a clear head. So the middle of the night is my time to be a wife.
Those hours are often the only time all day my husband and I get alone. Without them, we’d be two adults who gave up romance to run a chaotic day-care center. With them, we can be partners, lovers, and friends. This is the truth: If asked to visualize my husband as a lover, his face comes to me in shadows. I can draw all the bumps and creases of his moonlit profile with my eyes closed. This is the even bigger truth: Without these stolen hours, I don’t know what kind of marriage we’d have, or if we’d have one at all.%uFFFD
The exhaustion was what nearly did us in. Nearly did me in, to be more accurate, which would have done us both in before long. It was the kind of dramatic limbs-pinned-to-the-bed exhaustion, a cement-helmet-pressing-down-on-the-top-of-my-head exhaustion, that engulfed me like a physical tsunami as soon as our first daughter, Maya, was born. The kind of exhaustion that keeps you glued to the sheets with your eyes closed, wondering in a panic, Chronic Fatigue? Lupus? Cancer? Cancer. Oh my god%uFFFD
My entry to motherhood was ten weeks with a colicky infant who never slept more than two hours at a stretch. Only breast-feeding could calm her; she wouldn’t take a bottle at night and shrieked without pause if anyone rocked her other than me. Those first months I averaged about five hours of broken sleep a night, slightly better than the new-mother average of four and a half, but still nowhere near the zone of proper functioning. I’d always been a solid eight-hour-a-night sleeper, able to function on seven in a pinch but cranky, headachy, and forgetful on anything less. But this postpartum period was another solar system entirely. I would lie down at 10 P.M. thinking, What’s the point? knowing I’d be awake again in two hours’ time to comfort a squalling infant for the next hour, eventually to lie down and wonder again, What’s the point? My days became a series of weird and cyclical déj%uFFFDus. I would start the morning feeling that I’d never even slept, haul myself through the daily tasks of new motherhood, and collapse on the bed again at 10 P.M., my mind whirling from lack of sleep. What’s the point?%uFFFD
This kind of sleep deprivation does evil things to a person. I was bitchy. I was despairing. I was depressed. Even the simplest chores%uFFFDfolding a load of laundry, paying the electric bill, blow-drying my hair%uFFFDfelt like magnanimous efforts, so impossible to master that I couldn’t muster the energy to try. Now I know that profound and prolonged sleep loss puts women at serious risk for postpartum depression, but I didn’t know it then. I just thought something had gone terribly wrong with me. It was as if some essential cord of humanity inside me had snapped. All of my previous desires%uFFFDfor food, for intimacy, for companionship, for sex%uFFFDhad become focused into a hard little knob of longing for just one thing: sleep. Sometimes in the middle of rinsing dishes I’d lean my forehead against the kitchen cabinet and close my eyes, daydreaming about four hours of uninterrupted rest. Just four hours, damnit! Was that too much to ask?
“Maybe you can try to sleep while you’re breast-feeding,” my husband, John, said, trying to be helpful. “You could feed her lying down.”%uFFFD
The other me, the me who until just recently was a normal sleeping person, would have thought, Sweet idea from someone without breasts. But this new me, this ugly, desperate me, didn’t give a shit about good behavior. This one had lost her filter. “And maybe you could sleep through an hour of constant, tiny tugs on your penis?” I spat back.
“Sorry!” John said, lifting his hands in the air in defeat. “Sorry!” He retreated backwards from the room.
My poor husband. He really had no idea what hit him. Just one month earlier he’d been an eager, expectant father with a ravishingly pregnant wife who prepared dinner every night. Now he had a beetfaced, squalling alarm clock of an infant and a wife who couldn’t aim milk into a cereal bowl without splashing it all over the counter. And then spun around and yelled at him for not helping her more when he tried to wipe it up.
My husband became the focused object of my despair, the one person who had what I wanted but couldn’t seem to get. Because he wasn’t the one breast-feeding, and could somehow sleep through Maya’s nighttime cries, he was getting something that resembled enough sleep. I, by contrast, had developed a kind of bizarre maternal radar that now woke me thirty seconds before Maya started to stir in her bassinet, reducing my sleep time that much less. This hardly seemed fair. It wasn’t fair, but I had begun to realize that profound sleep deprivation is something only mothers have to suffer, and I would be lying if I said I accepted this with any degree of grace.
That’s the most insidious part of maternal fatigue. It doesn’t go away. Even when the baby starts sleeping through the night, and glimpses of your old self reemerge with increasing frequency and duration, it’s too late. Your sleeping patterns have irrevocably changed. Once you’re a parent, you never really sleep again, even when you’re sleeping.
Still, even on such fractured sleep one can manage to make it through most of a day with reasonable amounts of good cheer. At least that’s what I like to believe. On a typical morning the blue alarm clock next to my bed goes off at 6:40 A.M. From that point on, I’m on the hamster wheel, starting with the morning breakfasts-lunch-boxes-backpacks-hair-brushing-clean-up-the-kitchen routine. I do the school drop-offs, followed by a six-hour workday, finishing in time for the afternoon pickups. Then I chauffeur the girls to their various afternoon activities and play dates, until it’s time to return home to cook dinner, serve dinner, clean up dinner, and supervise homework and baths. At 7:20 P.M. the automatic garage door goes up, signaling John’s return. Then it’s divide and conquer time, with him reading one child’s set of bedtime stories and me taking over the other. On a good night we’ve got both kids in bed with lights out by 8:45, and I’m just about ready to join them.
Except. That’s precisely when John wants his time with me, too.
He’s such a good man, my husband. Honest. Loyal. Hardworking. Kind. But there’s the small problem of his libido, which kicks into gear every night at about 9 P.M. Or maybe it’s more like his libido is in gear all day, and 9 P.M. is the first chance he gets to exercise it with me.
Unfortunately, my libido is somewhere in the vicinity of Antarctica by that time. Touching parts of my body that would normally make me pant and quiver feels about as arousing as having my kneecap rubbed through the sheet. Nothing, truly nothing, compares to lying down with my husband under a down blanket at the end of the day, but by 9 P.M. that’s really all I want: ten minutes to myself to read a few pages in a book, and then the heavenly sensation of turning out the light and closing my eyes for the night.
If you’re wondering how often a married couple manages to have sex under these circumstances, the answer would be, oh, ’round about never. Does this make my husband feel dejected and rejected? Sometimes. Does this twist me up inside with anxiety and guilt? Always.%uFFFD
That’s when you have to start getting creative.%uFFFD
%uFFFD
I can’t remember the first time it happened. There have been so many nights since then, they’ve blurred together in memory. Still, it’s easy to imagine the inaugural event going something like this:
The loud yipping of a coyote pack pierces the dark. Or maybe the cat starts doing his inexplicable cat things on the hardwood floor downstairs, or Maya shouts, “My sunglasses! My sunglasses!” in her sleep, and I wake up. John is curled up next to me, his body a small, bumpy mountain in the night.
The blue alarm clock on my night table reads 2:02 A.M. I stare at the ceiling, wrapped in a cocoon of calm wakefulness. I know I haven’t slept enough for the night, but I don’t feel like I need more right now. I reach over and lay my hand on John’s shoulder. He stirs slightly under my touch.
“Are you awake?” I whisper, softly. It’s an irritating question, I know, but I wouldn’t ask it if I thought he was really sleeping.
“Yes,” he whispers back.
“I can’t get back to sleep.”
%uFFFD“Me, neither.”
We roll to face each other. I lay my hand against his cheek. It’s the gentlest sustained touch I’ve been able to give him all day.
“Do you want a back rub?” he asks. “Mmm,” I say, rolling over. I can’t think of anything that sounds better at this moment. John has hands that can push the tension right out of you.
Once or twice a week we wake like this. Sometimes we’ll stay in bed, making love in the darkness, luxuriating in the found hours together. If we need to talk, we’ll creep downstairs in the dark and sprawl across a couch. Removed from the rat-a-tat-tat of the morning school routine or the evening homework-dinner-bath-bed sequence, we finally have time to discuss something%uFFFDanything%uFFFDwithout interruption. It’s in these hours that most of our connecting takes place, reminding us that we’re alert, intelligent, sexual partners with a passion for each other’s bodies and minds. Then we go back to sleep for a few hours before the alarm clock rings.
We decided to refinance our house in the middle of the night. It’s also when we chose Maya’s school, grieved the loss of my father, developed an Internet marketing strategy for my last book, discussed how to give me a year off work, and planned all our family vacations. We sleep this way during vacations, too. When Eden, our younger daughter, eventually asks how she was conceived, I’ll tell her, “In a pension in the Old Town of Prague, local time 3 A.M.”
Half our friends think we’re crazy to live this way. They suggest baby-sitters and earlier bedtimes, and a moratorium on lying down with the kids at night, as if we haven’t thought of this already. The other half thinks we’ve landed on a brilliant, innovative idea. “I can’t believe we didn’t think of it ourselves,” one of my girlfriends said.
I, too, might view it as a unique solution, if it weren’t so quaintly retro. Apparently, all preindustrial families slept in segments like this, with a first shift between about 9 P.M. and midnight, followed by a few hours of calm wakefulness and then a “second sleep” until dawn. In the middle of the night they brewed beer, smoked pipes, conversed with neighbors, or stayed in bed and made love. (Think about it: how else could families expand to seven or eight children when everyone slept together in a teepee or a single heated room?)
Take away artificial light at night and the way it messes with our melatonin levels, and we’d all sleep in intervals, like wild animals do. Some sleep researchers view insomnia as the body’s attempt to reassert its natural, primal pattern. I prefer not to think of John and me as so desperate for time together we have to bisect the night to get it. Instead, I like to think of us returning to our animal instincts, getting back in touch with our ancestral, biological roots.%uFFFD
%uFFFD
One night, I dream my younger daughter’s eczema flares up red and raw on the front of both legs. Beneath it, I find sparkling jewels embedded in her skin. When I try to take them out, I discover they’re attached to her legs with tiny gold safety pins I have to remove carefully, one by one.
I wake with my heart beating fast at 3:23 A.M. When I reach out with my right arm for John, the sheets are flat.
I find him downstairs, partially illuminated by the glow from his laptop screen. When he hears me coming down the stairs, he looks up and smiles.
“Hi, sweetie,” he says, extending his hand. “You were sleeping so deeply, I didn’t want to wake you.”
I scoot over against his shoulder and sneak a look at his computer screen. It’s a detailed and complicated spreadsheet. Next to him lies a sheet of scrap paper where he’s been scribbling notes and arrows.
“What are you working on?” I ask, snuggling up against him.
“Oh, just this presentation,” he says, and then he starts to explain.
We talk about the pros and cons of his approach, and agree that his greatest skill is as a strategist. That’s why our marriage works so well, I say: because in our house he’s the idea person, and I’m good with implementation. This segues into a discussion about the amount of energy it takes for me to do most of the executing, and he comes up with some good ideas to lighten my load.
“Thanks,” I tell him, and I mean it. “No problem,” he says.
We look at his spreadsheet some more, and it reminds me of Maya’s last math test.
“She’s having trouble with multiplication tables,” I say. “The teacher is timing the kids, and she can’t think of the answers fast enough.”
“Maybe we should make her some flash cards,” he suggests.
“And quiz her in the car on the way to school in the morning,” I add.
This is how it goes, until nearly 5 A.M. I sit up straight and pat him on the thigh. “I’d better get some more sleep before the morning rush,” I say.
“I’ll be up in a couple minutes,” he says. I kiss him on the side of the head and go back upstairs.
Sometimes, if I’m honest, these early morning conversations are better than sex. Or maybe what I mean to say is they’re even more essential, allowing us to reconnect with the parts of each other we love most. Here, in these stolen hours, we’re freed from the roles that define us so stringently during the day: mother, father, homeowner, husband, wife. Here, we’re just two people, rediscovering each other in the dark. It’s in these hours that I remember all the reasons why I chose my husband, why I will never leave his side, and how he makes my life complete.
Rip my nights in two, if that’s what it takes to remind me. Rip them in three or four. The magic of our marriage lies in the sum of these parts, all of the scattered pieces working so efficiently together, this collaborative, postmidnight miracle that keeps our marriage whole.
Adapted from the essay “The 3 a.m. Marriage” Copyright %uFFFD 2007 by Hope Edelman, from the book “Blindsided by a Diaper” Copyright %uFFFD 2007 by Dana Bedford Hilmer. Published by Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc.
