Bedtime Stories

Night Owl is a big part of my identity. 

As the distance from my parents’ deaths grew, Night Owl remained one of the few connections to them. They both stayed up late, took naps, slept in strange locations. It’s one of my few living connections to them: not a picture in an album in a box in a closet, but an actual continuing legacy, renewed each night.

I explained this to my CBT-I doctor, and he was sympathetic. In our early appointments, we talked about barriers to sleep. This remaining connection to my parents is a strong one, as well as genuinely feeling more alert and creative in the evenings. He suggested I discuss these feelings with my talk therapist.

My talk therapist, Deborah, has a beautiful, cozy office close to my house. She’s just ten years older than me, so she understands my references and the general, shall we say, milieu of my childhood. Most importantly she has two adorable little dogs who are often in attendance. More than once I forced myself to go to therapy because I wanted to pet those dogs.

She specializes in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a technique specifically used for processing trauma. For me, the process is usually thus:

1. Choose a topic to discuss.
2. Deborah moves her fingers across my eyeline, almost like she is testing my peripheral vision. She also has a machine that sort of, like, strobes light back and forth, but I don’t like it.
3. After counting to 30, she asks me what I’m thinking about, or what I remember, or what else.
4. Talk, then repeat. Basically, we are digging through all of the layers to get back to the beginning. 

We talked about my parents and our Night Owl Life. And as we talked, I slowly realized: 

When I was very little, my parents stayed up late because my dad was in a band that played weekends, and because my mom worked nights so they didn’t have to pay for childcare. Obviously playing in a band, and attending your husband’s shows, is a pretty cool reason to stay up. But working third shift so someone was with the kid, maybe not. Mom said she liked being a third shift waitress and dealing with drunks, but as an adult I think she might not have been fully truthful.

Then, when I was 10, I became quite sickly, culminating in gallbladder removal when I was 13. My mom would stay up late to comfort me. Also the year I was 13, she fell and badly broke her leg. That was the year the Olympics were in Atlanta, and we were both awake, watching CNN when the Olympic Park Bombing happened. Again, looking back, those were not fun or ideal conditions to be awake.

And when I was a teen, my parents took sick. My mom had been a waitress for around twenty years, and that took its toll on her body. She slept in the living room in a recliner so she could get the support she needed. My father had heart problems that led to his death; at times, he too slept in the living room. Eventually he needed an oxygen machine, a large unit that stayed in the bedroom, tubes snaking through the apartment. In an ideal world, I don’t think either would have wanted to live and sleep that way. 

On top of that, teenagers’ sleep cycles shift, often going to bed after 11 PM. So I was up anyway, and viewed the situation as “oh look at the three of us, awake together, watching TV together, this is normal,” not as an abnormality or temporary lifestage.

And then my father died and I moved a thousand miles away for college and my mom fell apart mentally. No wonder I couldn’t sleep. Being a Night Owl was a lifeline I could grasp, memories of happier times. 

At 41 years old, just as much as my parents’ deaths, being a Night Owl was fucking up my life. If I give up the identity, perhaps I lose a connection to my parents, but it is a connection of pain and hardship. I can find new ways to keep them with me.