Insomnia Hits Different Now,

Before I got pregnant - God, that seems like such a long time ago now - I used to get really aggravated when people would tell me that I didn't know what tired was because I wasn't and never had been a parent. It honestly bugged the hell out of me. Now that I am a parent, it still bugs the hell out of me. 

Here's the thing. I've had sleep issues for a long time and when I was writing over one of the summers after I was in college, I got into this fabulous routine where I was going to sleep around 2am and getting up around 10am and I was wildly more functional as a person than I have been in a long time. All of a sudden I was getting enough sleep and getting through sleep cycles so I actually felt rested and it was just glorious, but it's a sleep pattern that doesn't fit in with work or with a lot of things and it certainly doesn't fit in with my son, partly because he is still working on the idea of a sleep routine...

Insomnia hits differently now because I used to give myself the permission to sleep more when I could, and I don't really get to do that as much anymore because my son doesn't always love naps and sometimes by the time he gets down for a nap I'm too awake to also have a nap, but also because the point where it becomes a problem and the point where I can do something about it have swapped now. If I realise I'm hitting the point of exhaustion where I need a solid sleep, I need to take some meds to help me sleep before about 10pm, but most of the time I don't figure out that I'm actually struggling until about 1am and then it's too late to be able to do anything, because the type of meds that help me sleep can leave me slightlu incapacitated which isn't an option when I'm the only adult who will be in the house for a few hours with my son and it's also a time when he is likely to be awake and need attention.

People told me that you find a new reserve of energy and you're able to get through the day and unless I'm missing something or that doesn't kick in until you go back to work, it's not happened unfortunately, and I'm worried that it won't, but I guess I will have to wait to find out...