Zen and the Art of Sleeping

I know I’ve been writing a lot about not sleeping lately, and I know if I want to sleep, I should probably write about sleeping, not about not sleeping—what you resist persists—but I need to say one more thing on this topic. Last week, I had a moment of unscheduled grace, a surprise truce in the bedtime wars. I don’t know where it came from, but I want to record it so I can remember it in case it doesn't happen again.

For most of the summer, I’ve been wrestling with Pippa’s resistance to going to bed in the evening and staying in bed during the night. We’ve tried lots of different tactics, some recommended, some not: putting her right back in bed without a word, over and over; threats; taking away her pacifier; stickers and rewards; even, in my most desperate and reactive Mommy Dearest moments, spanking. Not surprisingly, nothing has really stuck. 

So, last week: Steve helped me give the girls dinner and then left to play Ultimate like he does every Tuesday. Maisy went to bed without a peep, and then it was Pippa’s turn. We went through the whole song and dance routine—teeth brushing, PJs, book, 100 pats, one round of ABCs, and then “my favorite part of the day was _____ “(fill in blank). “Stay in your bed,” I told her right before I closed her door, cringing with dread as I did.

I parked myself in the hall. Instead of going to the kitchen or grabbing my notebook to write, I just stood there, waiting. I told myself I had nothing better to do. There was nothing I had to do but stand there and put her back in her bed ten times or 100 times, and weirdly, I was OK with it. I whittled all my normally enormous expectations down to a single, tiny sliver of purpose: Stand outside the door as long as it takes until she goes to sleep. I didn’t go into the bedtime routine planning to get all Zen on the situation, but there you have it. I’d stumbled into an uncharacteristic state of acceptance, and I was going with it.

She came out. Of course she did. Several times. Each time I spoke quietly in a unperturbed voice that did not sound like my own and put her back in her bed and because I had already written off wanting to write or read or do yoga or make dinner or anything quote-unquote productive with my evening, I was not attached to any of those scenarios. I did not get mad. I even thought, I could do this all night, and I wasn’t showing off or faking it. I actually meant it. Even better, I actually felt it. It was peaceful outside that door. Steve has lined the deep, flagstone windowsill with aloes and agaves and other succulents whose names I’ve forgotten but that glow green in the slanting light and have sharp prickly points in whose honor we have, perhaps unfairly, named it the “sill of pain” for the potential for causing inflict harm on small curious fingers. (Though in reality it is far more beautiful than dangerous.) I stood there looking at the sill of pain, and watching the natural light in the hall dim a little, and for once in the past eight weeks, feeling no attachment or gripping resentment or any discomfort whatsoever. 

At one point, I slipped into the laundry room next door and started folding laundry. I had no ambition to fold laundry, it just seemed like something calm and meditative to do, peaceful, like the waiting itself.  Click, went her door, and she appeared in my door. The sight of her did not really perturb me. I wasn’t attached to folding laundry (though when am I ever attached to folding laundry?!) and so I stopped what I was doing and put her back in bed. 

I could tell she could tell something was different, and that it made her curious, but not so curious that she would keep doing this. I could tell that was going to be the last time I heard from her that night, and it was. But I didn’t leave my post right away. I stood there feeling the night settle down on the house, and my calmness radiating out from me like a deep, still lake without a single ripple in it. 

Then I went outside, still in my three-quarter trance, and walked around the house in my bare feet. We call this “going round the world.” Our house in long and skinny like a bowling alley and Steve has laid a flagstone path the entire way around, and I walk it as often as I can in bare feet so I can feel the slightly coarse but flat, regular texture of the slabs beneath my feet and admire Steve’s garden as I go and pass by Dad’s peach tree, and in doing all this in this way, have my own little unofficial walking meditation. It’s not so different than my other evening circumnavigation ritual: When I was at Stony Lake in July, I'd put the girls to bed in the boathouse and eat dinner and double checked that they were still down, and then I’d go out in my mother’s new skiff or one of the kayaks and paddle around the island. 

Of course there’s something calming in traveling in a circle, whether by foot or by water. It’s the repetition and familiarity of the route, the fact that you can do it in opposite directions, and it will feel different even though you have memorized every inch of shoreline and every stipa grass or hollyhock along the way. Unlike paddling around Eagle Mount (which takes about half an hour give or take, depending on how many times you stop to drift idly and listen to the loons or swat at mosquitoes) when I go around the world at home, I usually make a few laps. The first one I might be somewhere else in my mind, debating whether this is a waste of time and I should be writing or doing yoga instead, but by the second lap, I am usually into the walk, feeling the ground with my feet, and hearing the gold finches and hummingbirds buzz by and just really there. I keep walking until I feel the tug of the house at me, and other demands or desires, and then I go inside and do something else. 

RTW

I went around the world that night a few times, and each time I passed the sill of pain from the outside, I peered in through the darkening window to make sure Pippa’s door was still shut, and it was. But if it hadn’t been, I’m pretty sure I would have been able to float inside the house in my little Zen trance and do the thing I needed to do, over and over if I had to. But I didn’t and it was peaceful, and I walked around a few more times and then went inside to see about dinner. 

That that night was an anomaly, and that for the following three nights I would enact scenes from Mommy Dearest as I cajoled and yelled and willed her to stay in bed doesn’t really matter. Of course I did. But for a moment I was the lake without a ripple in it, and I had shed every last prickle of ambition and impatience and resistance and was free.