I’d like a rebate. Or something.
I had the worst case of insomnia last night. After sleeping from 10 to 1 am, I jerked awake and stayed that way until well after Chris left the house at 5 am. At one point I stared at the ceiling while the bed shook because the cat was giving herself an extended tongue bath, and the room filled with her wet/dry smacking sounds, and I worked hard to resist the urge to throw her out the open window, through the screen. It took every ounce of energy, and as wired as I was, that was a lot of energy.
I probably should have gotten up and packed CDs or made myself a birthday cake, but I didn’t want to keep anybody else awake. Instead, I ruminated on the way my life suddenly seems to be in fifth gear again, on how I need to be rested enough to go from zero to ninety in ten seconds, on how impossible that will be if I am unable to sleep. I thought about how this family is going through some major changes, and how I need to be the glue that keeps it all together, but how I don’t feel sticky enough in the right way. Night sweat sticky, yes. Glue sticky, not so much.
I said to myself, “Thus begins my fortieth year.” I said it out loud, hoping that Chris would hear me and make sympathetic cooing noises at me from across the great divide where Lila had her head jammed into his armpit, while I shoved her feet away from my ass crack every four minutes.
Chris is not a cooing kind of guy. He’s more of a grunting, “I’m awake over here too, and I have to get up in a few minutes to move giant bars of steel around and turn them into useful things for big machines, so quit your complaining,” kind of guy. He’s more of a “Well, I know how to tire you out baby, let’s move this to the other room,” kind of guy.
Unfortunately last night I was an “If you touch any spot on my itchy skin, or think for one minute that I will be able to rise up out of the miasma that is my headache, or be able to ride the waves out of the stormy, churning sea that is my growly, sore tummy courtesy of the garlicky sweet potato and black bean burritos we ate for dinner, well, no. I won’t. So quit thinking about it,” kind of bitchy, older than my age, useless fart of a woman.
Happy Birthday to me!