Sleep disorder

I awoke to a panic attack last night and it’s symptomatic of a wider malaise. My sleep is interrupted and has been for weeks. I feel I’m on a downward spiral, but for what? With our biggest problem solved – money, of course, I should feel luckier than many. But the cumulative stress of the last five years does not dissipate overnight. My sleep deprivation has left me underperforming at work, crabby with the kids, snippy with Tom and isolating myself from friends and family. If it sounds like a list of symptoms then it probably is. But I’ve fought my way out of this particular knot before. Sort the sleep, then everything else unfolds. On a scale of one to Gaza, it‘s really nothing major, but as Robin Williams has proved, what one person considers an unsolveable problem is all relative. I’m probably a bit depressed. So what’s new?

Offloading to the beautiful Helorigi today when she turned up from the flat she shares with the other half of my interchangeably gamine, brunette and be-fringed babysitters to take the kids this morning, I felt like I was whining, stood in my lovely home, about to leave for my permanent, reasonably well paid job. But my spontaneous eruption into tears as I described my panic attack was genuine enough. She asked if there was one thing I would change, what would it be? A sterling job of pop psychology if ever there was one, it’s not hard to see why she is so universally liked by everyone who meets her.

It was hard to answer, but it’s always the same thing. I feel compromised, unfulfilled, my potential diminishing. A bit trapped. My frustration makes me difficult. From her perspective with her band on the cusp of superstardom, biding her time, wide eyed and bambi limbed, until her moment comes – as it already is, she pitied me, with the perplexed confidence of youth and talent and beauty.

She asked if having children was really so hard, and I answered, pausing, it’s unremitting. The sacrifices we make are hard to swallow no matter how willingly we make them. I feel, and still feel I sacrificed myself, by going into it blind, too young. May she embark on motherhood on firmer foundations, for all I may have been financially secure, she will have already tasted her own success. That is the choice we make, if we make it at all, for most don’t have such luck in their twenties, or even thirties. Women are impelled to give it up just when personal fulfilment seems in reach.

I swallowed my bitterness with a cup of coffee and left her to a day of park and water fights and tantrums; I wiped away my freshly applied, freshly smeared eyeliner, and girded my loins for the cycle tube walk stairs-athon ahead of me, arriving puffed out and sweating, still smudged at the other end of London, to start the rest of my day.