“Mummy?”
The room was completely dark. From the groggy depths of sleep, I tried to make out who was standing over my bed. It was the third night in a row that the night had been disturbed for one reason or another, and it felt as though I was trying to struggle from beneath a lead blanket.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t feel very good.”
“Oh, sweetie, come here.” I drew the child under the covers. Her temples were burning. We lay there together for a moment, roasting quietly, but I knew I had to get up.
“Back in a minute,” I whispered. Careful not to disturb my sleeping husband, I crept out of the bedroom and tiptoed down the stairs, leaving the lights off lest the brightness make a return to sleep more difficult. I was making my bleary way across the kitchen, headed for the drawer where we kept the — CRASH!
Shrieking pains shot through my hands and feet and the air reverberated with the sound of a semi-somnambulant person blundering into a puppy’s large wire playpen. The pen had been in the middle of the kitchen for a month and a half; you’d think I would have remembered. Alas, there is nothing so fuzzy as a brain yanked from sleep midway through the REM cycle. As I limped onwards in search of children’s ibuprofen I was grateful not to have lost a finger or toe. Unfortunately, however, I was now fully awake.
Getting back to sleep in the middle of the night can be torture, as fellow sufferers will attest. Lying there unable to drift off, you can feel the precious eight-hour window closing. As a grown-up, you won’t get a nap, you can’t make up the missed rest — it’s a desperate feeling.
Interestingly, the BBC recently reported that the whole eight-hours-of-shut-eye concept may be a myth. Mounting historical and neuroscientific evidence suggests that human beings may be designed to have a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night.
Apparently modern life and artificial lighting have confused our natural rhythms. “Many people wake up at night and panic,” the BBC quoted Oxford professor Russell Foster as saying, rather amusingly: “I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.”
I thought of this, as I tiptoed back upstairs. After pausing on the landing to pour liquid ibuprofen into a plastic cup, I stole into the bedroom. I made a wide circle to avoid cracking my shins on the bedstead, and also to keep from waking my husband if by some miracle he’d slept through the crash.
Phew — I’d made it. Easing on to the edge of the bed, beside the child, I whispered in the tiniest voice imaginable, “Sweetie, here’s your medicine.”
There was no reply.
I felt the child’s forehead. It was damp and cool. While I had been busy half-severing my digits downstairs, her fever had broken.
“Ah, she’s fast asleep,” I whispered to myself.
“Lucky girl,” said my husband, from the darkness.
I wondered if I should tell him not to worry, since we were simply experiencing a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.
Wisely, I chose to forebear. “Good night,” I said.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
