Reflections on the necessities of life and encouraging your child to embrace sleep time!
When I was young it would meet me at night and I would fight its mysterious welcome, embracing me in that strange darkness as my eyes closed and my mind faded. “But Momma, no! I don’t want to go to Sleep!” I said so many times. Sleep seemed so boring and I was curious why I needed 8 hours of it. Where did I go for those 8 hours as I closed my eyes? Sometimes I would be taken to places called dreams or nightmares, other times I would go nowhere and wake up with nothing to talk about it. Sometimes Sleep didn’t give me a meaningful story to retell myself; other times it did, predicting the future and peculiar things that would end up coming true in my life. Either odd or glorious, Sleep gave me a world I strangely looked forward to more and more as I grew up. Sleep was my favorite when I got home after a late night party with people and loud noises. It welcomed me in her elusive arms as I dozed off that night, always treating me as it remembered me so well as a baby when I first came into this world, frozen in time:
“Come child, rest your little heart and mind. Maybe I’ll let you take your imagination places tonight or maybe I’ll just leave it be. I hope its bright and cheerful but if it’s dark and scary I promise to wake you up. You’ll be ok. That’s what Day is for sometimes: to recover from night. But most of the time it will be Sleep (me) you need to recover from Day. I will rejuvinate your soul, mind and body so don’t forget how important I am. Sometimes the most satisfaction comes in little hour naps, too, when you can’t bear to get through the whole day without me. When you wake up from those little bouts of me you will feel a quiet kind of jubilee, ready to go through the rest of the Day before you meet me again at night.”
Often, as I would open my eyes in the morning, I was intrigued by the realization that I just slept for 8 hours. “What if I never needed Sleep”, I thought? Like an owl or a fish, that would be quite lonely because everyone else would be embracing Sleep around me. So, I’m glad that I now love Sleep and look forward to meeting it every night. Resting the beat of my heart, the thinking of my brain, the tension of life—it's like Sleep repairs me every night and that’s why Day feels so sweet again. Sometimes I look forward to going to bed more than I feel like waking up whereas other times I look forward to waking up more than I look forward to going to bed. Sleep and Day balance me out. I get to accomplish another exciting Day because Sleep gave me that strength I needed, recharging my life in such mysterious ways when I open my eyes back open every Day…..Thank you, Sleep. See you again soon.