Musician's Widow

I’ve been battling something of a case of insomnia the last two weeks. I’m not entirely sure what set it off, but I just can’t sleep most nights. I lay awake, tossing and turning, cursing the ceiling. My husband sleeping soundly beside me. It’s so frustrating! I just want to sleep normal hours! Hopefully, I’ll get past this again soon. Until then, I’ll be keeping watch through the night hours for everyone.

We finally had our first winter snow here in Nashville. Not much at my house:

But, its still pretty. Downtown was snowing pretty good when my husband and I went out last night. I’ve definitely lived here long enough that I’m not phased by it any more. A couple years ago, you wouldn’t get me out of the house if there was even a CHANCE of snow. Now? Eh. Now I watch the weather and gauge my freak-out need accordingly. This? This was not even a 1 on my freak-out scale.

It was nice to finally see some snow, though. Last year we had an exceptional amount of snow, and I don’t want THAT again. But, the snow is pretty and I was hoping I’d get to see some this winter. Now I have and it finally feels like winter to me. So that’s a yay.

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone! Oh I know, its superstitious as being a day of bad luck. I’ve not really ever noticed anything exceptional about past Friday the 13ths. So, I just say, “Hey, cool, its Friday. Let the weekend begin!”

I did learn something already today, though. “friggatriskaidekaphobia – A morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th.” (From Skeptic’s Dictionary) That’s a really big word and should mean, “Fear of getting that word in a spelling bee.” But maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, don’t let the date freak you out. Enjoy the day! Happy Snow Day to any teachers and students who may be reading, ready to enjoy a 4 day weekend. Go back to bed and make the most of it! Maybe you can sleep… here’s hoping I can, too!

I almost made it through NaBloPoMo without missing a day. Almost. I missed yesterday. However, I have a good excuse.

Sunday night, my husband and I hit the road from Texas to Tennessee. I had intended to write about our trip on Monday, since it was 13.5 hours long and surely it would make for a semi-interesting post. We drove from 8:30 pm to 10 am the next morning, successfully running behind the mad Thanksgiving day traffic for the last 12 hours of the drive.

After that many hours on the road, though, my muse was sleeping. Writing just wasn’t going to happen. So I figured I would get some sleep, then write when I got up.

Instead, I slept a lot longer than I meant to, and I hit the floor running. We had invited friends over for the evening, and our house was void of any food other than a couple cans of soup. So it was shower, grocery store, home, and cook.

It was a great choice to have friends over, though. We had SO  much fun just eating frozen pizza and decorating little liquor bottles into Christmas ornaments. It wasn’t until they headed home that I realized I’d missed posting the entire day.

Oh well, I decided. It was okay to miss a day writing about life just to live it for awhile.

Until 3 pm. Yes, I slept until 3 pm yesterday. And I didn’t even get a full 8 hours of sleep in doing so. Why? Because I don’t live on any sort of “normal” schedule. I live on normal-to-me.

I’ve been a bit “off” for years now. I’d say since around the time I moved to Nashville, because I opted to be on my husband’s musician schedule. One that consisted of night shows on the road, or late night shifts downtown. We would joke that, “There’s another 10 o’clock?” Because 10 AM to us was like 4 AM to “day jobbers.”

Ever since I started bartending, its gotten wayyyy worse. Why? Because of that unseen-never-thought-about fact that people who work at the bar don’t go home as soon as the doors close. And depending on the night, I could be headed home as late as 5 AM. (In the summer, I’ve driven home watching the sun rise a time or two.) Keep in mind, 5 AM is like 5 PM to the rest of the world. I get home and sometimes I’m hungry. So I have something to eat. I ALWAYS take a shower before I go to bed after working. I have to get the cigarette smoke out of my hair, and the sticky drink mess off my arms. Then I usually want to decompress with a little news on the TV and a quick look at Facebook.

Once all this happens, I will be crawling into bed around 8 AM. And then, yes, I sleep until at least 3 PM. And, as I said, I don’t get a full 8 hours even in doing so… Really, when it comes right down to it, I’m keeping a schedule just like everyone else… only its tilted backwards by about 9 hours. Get up, go to work, put in 8 or 9 hours, come home, do the at-home thing, then sleep. Get up the next day and do it again.

Nights I don’t work, its possible that my husband plays somewhere. Generally you can knock that arrival-home time back by about an hour (maybe 30 minutes) on those nights. And, honestly, even on nights neither of us work, we end up staying on the same schedule as we would if we were working. Its not that easy to flip flop around. At least its not for me!

Anywhere else, this would be so extremely weird… but not here in Nashville. No, any given night of the week, I could call almost half my phonebook and find the person on the other end awake at 2 or 3 AM. It is almost its own little sub-culture to the city. The night owls. We’re the ones up, watching the neighborhood through the night. We’re the ones there if you just need to get out awhile. We’re the ones keeping the tourists entertained. We’re the ones doing it because we love it. Because it works for us.

We’re not weird. We’re not different. We’re just living our lives one night at a time.

I’ve been on a different sleep cycle than most people much of my life. I remember even in elementary school staring at my classmates in shock that they’d go to bed by 8 or 9 pm. A random memory from 5th grade was asking someone, “You mean… you don’t watch M*A*S*H at 10:30 after the news before going to bed!?” What was WRONG with these people!?

Then high school came, and taking difficult courses meant boatloads on homework on top of all my extracurricular activities. It was in those years that I was introduced to After MidNite with Blair Garner. Blair and his team became my late-night friends. On nights they had particularly appealing in-studio guests, I’d finish my homework and lay in bed awake listening to the radio until I couldn’t hold my eyes open any more. It was in those days that my sleep time began to inch back later and later.

College days… well… college is a time of no-sleep for most academics. I pulled many all-nighters, opting to catch afternoon naps in the library or on a bench somewhere on campus in the sun. Sleep is something I got when I could get it.

It was as I neared the end of college days that I started staying up at all hours talking to the guy who would later become my husband. Just buddies, we found a kindred night-owl spirit in each other. When all else failed, we’d call one another to catch up on our days at 1 or 2 AM. As the years passed and friendship turned to more, it wasn’t unusual for me to stay up until 4 AM only to get up at 7 AM to make it to work by 8 (okay, fine, I usually strolled in closer to 8:30.) Then I’d catch a quick nap with my head on my desk behind the desktop computer mid-afternoon. Another nap early evening and we’d start all over again.

I share all of this to make my point that my sleep schedule has always been a bit off, but its been within the last four and a half years that its take a turn for the ridiculous time and time again.

It really started in the first year of our marriage when I was getting used to being a musician’s widow. A little freaked out (perhaps) about spending days on end home alone, I’d not sleep until the sun came up and I could hear our apartment complex come to life again. It was my little security blanket — knowledge there was people up and around, and it was somehow okay to slip into the vulnerable state of sleep.

Later, my schedule became thrown more with worries. Financial troubles loomed over my head. How would I pay the rent? What about the truck payment? Could we even eat this month? Those worries took a toll on me in many ways, but the biggest issue was probably the sleepless nights staring at the ceiling. Trying desperately to come up with a solution, knowing that the lack of sleep wasn’t helping me any but not knowing how else to cope.

Those worries eventually lead to us selling our second vehicle, and suddenly my sleep schedule became dictated heavily by my husband’s work schedule. Late night bus calls meant driving wherever the bus he was meeting was parked. Or if he came home at 6 AM, it meant just staying up to go get him, because going to sleep at 4 or 5 didn’t make sense just to get back up.

This, coupled with my picking up work at night myself (that gets me home around 4:30 or 5, and finally to bed around 6 or 7), my sleep schedule has officially gone nocturnal. (Its not the first time this has happened, mind you, but this is the longest its ever lasted.) Even on nights when I am home all evening, I’ll stay up until 7, go to bed, and then lay awake until 8 or 9! Usually its the brain that won’t turn off… thankfully, finances aren’t what keep me up much any more. It’s more writing ideas, photography ideas, or just thinking about the day. Thinking about my friends and my family. I’ll even say my nightly prayers more than once in that time period. I eventually turn to any number of games on my phone just to shut the brain off and allow sleep to take over.

I’ve grown frustrated with myself. I want to sleep closer to my more comfortable routine of bed by 5 (MAYBE 6), up around noon. I wouldn’t even be opposed to drifting off to sleep when its still dark out!

I figure I have two options. One is to just stay up one night into the next day. Pull an old all-nighter. I’ve done this before with success. Stay up over 24 hours, then go to bed actually around midnight, sleep well over 8 hours to catch up, then ta-da! I fall back into my old sleep rhythm the next night.

The other option is to short my sleep on the backside a few days. Get up “early” several days, forcing my body to want to go to sleep earlier to compensate. The problem with this one is that my husband usually ends up dealing with sleep-deprived-and-super-grumpy me for a few days. It does eventually work! But I also end up having to apologize a lot to my husband for being unduly crappy and whiney.

What will I end up doing? I don’t know. Looking at my schedule the next few months, it might not even be worth adjusting it too much until November anyway. However, I think I’d feel a bit better if I did… I don’t feel like pulling the all-nighter act again, so perhaps on a particularly long run for my husband coming up, I’ll do the short-my-sleep method. That way I regain control, and my husband isn’t here to hear my complaints. Win/win!

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I got this topic idea from Me You Health’s Daily Challenge. Today’s Well-Being prompt was: Identify a problem that has been worrying you, then write it down and brainstorm 2 solutions.

Last week was ridiculously successful. This week? Not so much.

Oh I have lots of things I got done that were really important. REALLY important. But in the grand scheme of calling it a “successful week,” I just wouldn’t. Heck, this is only my second blog post in a week. That should tell you a LOT. I’ve done good to barely keep my Project 365 alive!

Next week will be better. It has to be better. This weekend will be a big reboot and reset for me. Heck, next week will find me in a different state! So, please be patient with me for a few more days.

Life is crazy. And I just got mixed up in its insanity this week.

I’ve been battling something fierce with insomnia lately. Oh, I would get sleep here and there. A two hour nap in the evening. A few hours in the morning. All adding up to close to my needed sleep amount. However, my body has taken its vampiric (vampire-ish?) ways to a whole new level.

It all started, I suppose, all the way back to the days after Thanksgiving, when we were all messed up after driving all night back to Nashville. Then deep worry about finances and the future created full-fledged insomnia. For days on end, my body screamed for sleep, but my mind said, “Nuh uh.”

I turned to mind numbing games on my phone. I tried ambient sounds. But nothing seemed to help. I would toss and turn until late-morning, praying for an off button to my thoughts!

Those thoughts have mostly quieted. Now, I lay awake deciding how I want to arrange my future home. How I want to decorate. What do I need to do about utilities? Oh and all those change of addresses I need to send out. All the while, no part of me itches for sleep except my rational brain that knows sleep is for night (or atleast it should start when its dark…ish) and that I would LIKE to see daylight and enjoy the afternoon.

Saturday, I got up at an “ok” time I suppose. No, actually, it wasn’t an okay time. In no sense of the word is 4 pm, okay. And, as such, I missed both church and picking up a prescription at the pharmacy before they closed. I told my husband countless times that I had to get up at a “decent” time to make it to pick up my prescription the next day. Had. To. And I was determined to make it to Sunday evening mass.

He agreed, and we went to bed early (for us). I set alarms. I was determined to make this happen. Get up at a normal time. Only once again I found myself plagued with insomnia. This meant war, I decided. War with my own body and brain. I would WIN.

I sprayed my pillow with the best aroma therapy pillow spray known to man. Or woman. Whatever. No, seriously, It. Is. FABULOUS. But as I sprayed it on my pillow, I told my husband this could be a bad idea simply because often I sleep a little too deeply and have a hard time getting up in the morning. But, I figured I was desperate, and my insomnia would counteract that ANYWAY. So, I sprayed it on liberally and plopped down on my pillow.

Half an hour later. Nothing.

My next option was hopes that sinus medication would help. I had been fighting a sinus headache all night anyway, so I got up and found some sinus headache medicine that warned “could cause drowsiness.” Perfect. I took one and laid down and waited.

Nothing. Still wide awake. My sinus pain ebbed away, but sleep was a no show. The sun was streaming in already, and my husband was sound asleep. Grrrrr… I kinda wanted to kick him. Kinda. Okay, not really, but I was a bit jealous.

So, I got up and went to the kitchen (stopping to note that it was snowing!), poured a glass of milk and heated it in the microwave. I’d never tried it, but so many people had sworn to me that its the best sleep-medicine ever. So I tried it. I drank the milk (yum!), and went back to bed. I updated Facebook and Twitter about the snow, then laid back and hoped this time it would work.

I guess it did, because the next thing I remember is opening my eyes to a pitch black bedroom. I rolled over to see… 5:30 pm.

5:30!??!?!??! The pharmacy closes at 6:00, and I HAD to have my prescription. Church was at 6:00 too, and over half an hour away. That too was a no-go. :(

I had totally slept the ENTIRE day away. Straight through my alarm, and my husband getting text messages (which, by the way, his ringer is set on “wake the dead” which, I guess didn’t wake me since I wasn’t dead, but STILL!). Literally, blankets were flying. Jeans, sweatshirts, and baseball caps were thrown on… and we RAN out the door. We got my medicine and were back home before the clock hit 5:45 pm. I kid you not. From sleep to Target to home in 15 minutes. A new record, that’s for sure.

But, Sunday? Sunday just didn’t exist for me. December 5th is the day I totally missed. I ate lunch at midnight for goodness sakes!

I’ve decided, its time to reboot. I’m staying up until tonight and going to bed at a “normal” time. It’s worked in the past, so hopefully it’ll work again. I’m not pulling an all-nighter, I’m pulling an all-dayer. Because that’s just how I roll. Or something.

So I hope everyone can learn something from this:

• insomnia stinks
• warm milk works
• don’t mix warm milk with lavender pillow spray and sinus medication because it creates something close to being in a coma, it seems

You’re welcome.