The week before Christmas I hardly slept. Every night I would wake up between 12:30 and 1:30 and that would be it; I wouldn’t fall asleep again until close to five, and then there would only be a sliver of time before it was time to get up for good. I went through the days in a daze of exhaustion, constantly calculating the hours until I could go to bed, only to wake up again in the wee hours of the night, unable to sleep.
The night of December 23 was the same. In the morning, I woke abruptly before six and immediately began to add up all the hours I might possibly have been asleep. It was the same thing I used to do when the kids were infants; if I could convince myself that I had managed six or seven disjointed hours―forty-five minutes between one and two could be added to the fifteen minutes I managed after the alarm had gone off— I couldn’t possibly be as tired as I felt.
On the morning of Christmas Eve, however, the calculations seemed futile. No matter how I added them up, the sum was simply not enough. But there was no point in dawdling in bed. I was awake now, my mind already racing down my mental to-do list, and anyway I was sick to death of being in bed.
It was the to-do list that saved me. Each task I completed— make up the guest room, clean the house, make the dinner— seemed to keep my weariness at bay. Again, I was reminded of having a newborn, when exhaustion is so entrenched that you shouldn’t be able to function at all, and yet you do: you have no choice. You change the diapers and get up at three in the morning to nurse and haul the babies to their appointments with the pediatrician because you have to, and if you get a black eye from walking into the bedroom door in the wee hours of the morning or scratch the side of the minivan because you forget to close the mailbox, well, it’s hardly surprising, is it? But still your exhaustion is of no account: your children need you.
Christmas Eve presented the same kind of exigencies. Part of me wanted nothing more for Christmas than a night in a motel room— a quiet bed with no scratching dogs or thumping children, a bed with no memory of insomnia lurking in its sheets. But this was Christmas, the zenith of the holiday anticipation that had been building for more than a month. My kids were beside themselves with excitement; it felt unpardonable to damper their Christmas spirit with even the merest mention of how tired I was.
Is this just what mothers do? My own mom felt the first symptoms of diverticulitis on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. “My stomach is a little upset,” she merely said, and then proceeded to elaborately cook for and serve countless guests for five days. If anyone noticed that she herself hardly touched a bite, I was not among them.
I do not share my mother’s stoicism; I was not trained in the British stiff upper lip of silent fortitude. But still I knew enough not to darken my children’s day by harping on my exhaustion. Instead I told them I needed help.
“Can you three please sort those baskets of laundry?” I asked.
“But that’s not our job!” they protested indignantly.
But if ever there was a day to be good, this was it. Surely Santa must be watching as they sorted the laundry and cleaned their bathroom.
“Boy, this house has never been so clean!” Dee Dee said proudly.
Miraculously, by the time Don’s family arrived in the afternoon, we were ready. The house was tidy and mostly clean, the dinner prepared, the presents secretly wrapped. With only hours to go, I felt myself in the homestretch of an endurance race. I could make it! I coasted the last few hours. Christmas Eve dinner went off without the hitch, and then we all sank onto the couch to watch the Grinch and open the final windows of our advent calendars. That evening, the kids were almost as eager for their beds as I was for mine. I barely waited for them to be asleep before Santa came. My exhaustion had caught up with me and was pulling me under.
“We did it,” I told Don as I crawled gratefully into bed. Even to my ears, it sounded like Christmas was an ordeal to be endured, but that wasn’t what I meant. It was that this Christmas was a reminder to me of how hard we are willing to push ourselves for our children— for their survival, and for their joy. My first Christmas with Clayton, I was overjoyed simply to find that I was capable of keeping him alive. During those early days of motherhood, too, I lived life under a patina of exhaustion. This year, for one week, that feeling returned. Of course giving my kids a magical Christmas rich in tradition is a far cry from the treadmill of diapers and breastfeeding of their infancy, and yet the feeling it left in me was the same. My children need this; they deserve it. I have no choice but to do it. I’m a mom; it’s my job. I’ll sleep later, or not.
