When I am sleep deprived I feel like a giant vacuum cleaner has sucked the air out of my immediate horizon, flattening it and taking the colour right with it too.
Sleep deprivation makes me stop returning phone calls, increasing my loneliness.
When I am chronically tired – so tired that I want to run the car off the road just so I could go to hospital for a rest – I try so hard not to take it out on the people I deal with everyday. I fail. And eventually I stop caring about whether I am taking it out on other people.
I hold back frustrated, tired tears in the doctor’s office where I go in to deal with something unrelated and see my lovely doctor holding back unshed tears in sympathy.
Six months in to this whole dealing-with-four-small-children-thing and the cracks are beginning to show. The baby is just going through an awful phase and I honestly can’t remember the last time I had more than a couple of hours uninterrupted sleep. If there was something I could do to resolve this, trust me, I would have tried it. And somehow the fact that there is nothing I can do makes it all the more hard to remember that this is just a phase and one day I will be able to go to bed without adrenalin coursing through my viens in anticipation of the long, wakeful night ahead and one day I will be able to put this baby down for two minutes and do something, anything round the house, or, more likely, sit with my head in my hands because I’ve no idea where to start.
Because I am only a short step away from really not coping.
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