Working as a team, I do believe our boys could totally prevent me from sleeping whatsoever. They tend to alternate, such that they each get plenty of rest while I get little. Last night, I was thinking about this while up with Elias. He's been teething, and we've all had a wracking cough, such that sleep has been a mess for probably a solid two weeks.
Isaac has been waking up for no reason at 4 a.m. (I think coughing and/or too cold) and literally starting the day, going straight into a full day of school, and then coming home and collapsing without having dinner. This situation tends to perpetuate itself. Last night to make matters worse, Elias also collapsed at 6 p.m. Which you would think– great– now I can sleep. But there was a lot to do and so I did what I could before collapsing also around 9. I gorged on sleep until about 11 p.m., at which time Elias woke up to start the day.
I struggled against this terrible reality for a long while, alternating between the baby wailing in his crib and running amok in our bed– stepping on my head, pulling my hair out in hanks, trying to break my nose with his bowling ball head, etc.. (Ben, in a coma, slept through all.) Then decided that it was hopeless, and I would be best off just accepting my total sleeplessness. I figured that Elias would be up until about 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., and then shortly after I got him to sleep, Isaac would wake up to start the day! (Did I mention my wracking cough and Victorian wasting disease and death rattle?) So I figured it would be best to at least get the housework done so that the morning wasn't quite as hellish. Thus I was doing the dishes and making Isaac's lunch and folding laundry and so forth from about 11:30 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.
At that time I noticed that I was sitting on the couch, like the woman in "A Glass of Absinthe," as a two-foot-one, adorable, Lena-obsessed Attila the Hun laid waste to the house, babbling cheerfully all the while. He emptied drawers, dumped out toy boxes, pulled books off shelves, etc., while I gazed emptily into the middle distance, drunk only on exhaustion, and felt nothing. I knew in some far off place that it would be I, today, left to face and put right the wreckage, but my shoulders were slack and I had no more cleaning in me. After a while I carted him upstairs to try again on the whole sleeping thing, and to my amazement he slept. To my further amazement, Isaac woke up briefly, ingested a small snack I'd left by his bed, and went back to sleep until morning!
Thus I wallowed in sleep gluttonously for a full four hours before having to get up and rush about madly all day, which brings me to the present. Yes, Elias is asleep. Yes, the sink is again full of dishes (where do they all come from?). Yes, I should do something like either sleep or dishes, but instead I'm sitting here and writing this. Don't ask me…
Also in other news it seems my moribund writing career is getting a kiss of life. This summer I met this remarkable woman, Rebecca Darwin, the first woman publisher of the New Yorker, while we were on vacation. We bonded as our children played with "Flarp!" fart putty, and ran about on the beach together and so forth. Although her lovely porcelain-doll little girls spent a lot of time on their grooming, Isaac got comfortable with the elder one by the end of the week. Anyway, she's now publishing this new southern lifestyle magazine, very beautifully designed and upscale (love the satin finish on the paper), called Garden and Gun. She gave out some copies to everyone at the inn and some tote bags and beer snugglies and so forth. I read the issues with great interest and then, a few weeks later, pitched her some story ideas. Meeting her was certainly the type of good fortune that demanded action.
It's taken a while… this sort of thing always does… but at the moment she has accepted an idea of mine and I'm told a contract is on its way. This means that although it's only a 600-word piece, I will get PAID to do it, and surely it will lead to other things. The idea she's accepted is about the cherokee rose, the state flower of Georgia, and an interesting rose it is, too. It grows all over the south, and the legend is that wherever a Cherokee mother's tear fell, as she walked along the trail of tears, a cherokee rose sprang up.
Anyway, when I was girl I fell in love with the rose during a year I lived in Louisiana on my grandma's farm. A few years ago, when I was getting somewhat serious about my rose cultivation in my postage stamp in Cleveland, I searched high and low to duplicate the rose my grandma had. Turns out it doesn't grow this far north, and also it's a huge brambly monster that only blooms (stunningly, it drapes itself over whole trees and dumps down torrents of lovely white flowers) two weeks a year. So then i began to seek out alternatives that I could actually grow in a tiny zone five garden, etc., and so this is the gist of the article. So you want to grow a Cherokee Rose, but don't have room for it? What should you grow instead? Or If you want one, what do the experts say about how to grow it? etc. It's very short, one page, and will have some beautiful image taking up space. I've been e-mailing the managing editor there and working out the details.
If this all comes to pass as it seems it will (falling through is always an option, and the contract is not signed yet) it will run in the Spring issue, out in March.
Meanwhile, I've been investigating these wonderful, brightly colored toddler-containment facilities around town, and am thinking of putting Elias in one a couple mornings a week. Then I can lie on the couch with a cold compress on my head unpack and clean. Or maybe even write– what a concept.