The Rest of Our
Lives
by
Jeff Stimpson © 2007
"Sleepy's: For the rest of your
life!" -- slogan of a New York-area bedding store
Alex's sleep issues refuse to quit.
At bedtime we still pour into him melatonin, along with his Topamax.
A few hours before that, he gets his daily dose of calcium. Jill
says he drinks milk when he first gets home from school, and he
often has a banana now for dessert at dinner, so the real food's
there. So why does he bounce up most nights?
For about a year, there's been an
undertow of tired in me. At any moment I may have to shake my head.
If I start to stretch at my desk, I cannot stop yawning. The
undertow has been building for a long time. "Alex bustles lately
between 3 and 5 a.m. Jill and I have worked out a strategy for
overnight, in which one of us handles the kids if they get up, the
other gets up at 6:30 to wake Alex for the school bus. On weekends,
we split Night Duty at 4 o'clock." I wrote that three years ago.
"He bounces up anywhere from 1:30 to
4, and is sometimes up chirping for one to two hours." That was a
year ago.
The neurologist overseeing Alex's
Topamax wrote us a prescription for a sleeping pill. For Alex. We
can give him two, max. One bounces off him like bullets off
Superman. The last time we gave Alex two pills, he was so dead to
the world that he didn't wake up until he'd accidentally wet the
bed, which Alex never does.
Jill and I also continue Night Duty.
"I had it last night!" "But he didn't get up!" "But I still had it!"
"Oh all right!" It doesn't matter which of us says which lines.
Ned rarely wakes up, bad dreams
aside. Alex we find morning after morning in rumpled sheets. I
thought this would be behind us now, or at least would have
developed to the point where I'd be talking about it in a different
way.
We have few overnight breaks from
Alex. Autism prevents him, even at age 9, from staying overnight at
a friend's house. He will go away to camp for one week in late
August, and we're hoping that goes better than his previous
overnight camp experience. We've worked all winter to get one or two
of his classmates to go the camp at the same time, and to see if
counselors from his after-school and Saturday programs will work at
the camp at the same time. Even with all that, I think it's unlikely
he'll stay the whole week.
Sometimes, though, Alex will go as
much as almost a week "sleeping through." "Did Alex get up last
night?" "No, thank God." Again, doesn't matter who's saying which.
He also stays asleep better, though after those sleep-through nights
he tends to pop up at some USMC hour like 5:15 a.m.
At those hours he's actually
self-reliant, closing out bedroom door, turning Elmo on low, and
getting himself an overflowing plastic bowl of crackers or Goldfish.
Jill says she "forces" herself back to sleep that early in the
morning, but that bar of living room light under our bedroom door
often keeps calling me. Often I just get up, telling myself I'll
have two cups of coffee this morning only and that while everyone
except Alex and me is still asleep I'll get a jump on the day's
e-mail and Internet pornography.
That naturally calls for a nap in the
afternoon, but I often skip it and soldier through until my eye rims
are aflame by 9 p.m. Then with putting up the dishes and
straightening the house and checking the boys and preparing Alex's
metal cup for middle-of-the-night Benedryl and using the Waterpik
and getting tennis balls ready for the legs of my walker and talking
to Jill and other chores, 9 slips to 10 and often to 11. So I guess
I can't be that tired.
Copyright 2007 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
