Jet Lag

I used to believe in jet lag.

I tried to stay one beat ahead of my circadian rhythm. When travelling across time zones, I’d force myself to stay up late or wake up early, resetting my internal clock to local standard time.

Then I worked a night shift. For six months in Portland, I punched in at 8pm and out at 6am. I slept until early afternoon. I learned to treat the late afternoon as my morning and the evening as my day.

That job, clerking at a Plaid Pantry, taught me about sleep. It was my first year sober, in fact. It was a time when all I cared about was staying sober and paying the rent. That and poetry. Alone in the store at night, I smuggled in speakers to listen to Bob Dylan. I learned how to get the bulk of my responsibilities done early, so I could read at night.

For me, then, sobriety came with a brand new approach to living. I had dug myself into such a destructive rut, that when sober I leaped at every opportunity to experience an alternative. A newfound curiosity for life and living accompanied my going dry. I’ve heard people call these spiritual experiences and moments of clarity. Both applied to me then.

What did it really matter when I slept so long as I slept? If I had the time to read my Hermann Hesse and write bad poetry, I was content. It didn’t so much matter what I was paid as long as I could afford each meal. The notion of jet lag or calibrating my schedule to that of the waking world was busted.

Then kids happened.

Sleep became a screaming commodity, a bargaining chip: “If you feed him tonight, I promise to feed him all weekend.”

I didn’t take any leave when my son was born. I opted to save that time like a squirrel stores nuts in the winter. I’ve handled a night shift in Portland, after all. Not to mention a weeklong bender ending in a psychotic breakdown. I could handle a few after midnight diaper changes.

In that first month of working-parent status, I recall being so exhausted in my classroom—filled with teenage boys, mind you—that I fell asleep on my feet. They were finishing a quiz and I was leaning on one foot then another, a motion ingrained in my muscle memory after hours of unsuccessfully rocking my newborn son to sleep.

While those night shifts at Plaid Pantry paid off—I sang entire Dylan albums to him, for example—nothing prepared me for the sleep deprivation of parenting.

Now that my son is six, my daughter three, and—surprise, dear readers!—a third child is on the way, there doesn’t seem to be an end to the mania of bizarre sleep patterns. Instead of waiting out this time as a phase, I’m convinced my body has adjusted to a new normal.

Who cares about a little jet lag when the life of a parent is a turbulent red eye with no destination in sight?

We took our children to Colorado for spring break this year.

It was our first vacation in a year’s time. It was great to get away, but two of the five days were devoted to travel. A delay of our flight there put us in the airport for seven hours before the four flight and two hour shuttle to our destination. Add the time difference and some motion sickness and you have a recipe for a real humdinger of a family vacation saga.

My daughter really should nap every day. She has an unremittable fear of missing out; she outlasts everyone in our house at bedtime. She falls asleep eventually, sometimes in the hallway, but if there is a murmur of life happening in the other room, she will find the party and join in.

Naturally, it’s hard to convince her to nap on vacation, so we usually don’t try to. We prefer to let her run herself wild and deal with the behavioral consequences as they come than to force her into unwillingly into a nap time.

Sometimes the results of her fatigue are simple, a tantrum. Sometimes they are a little more severe, a banshee scream and brawling fists of fury. And then, occasionally, the results are adorable.

It was on our last night in Colorado that she fell asleep at the dinner table. We were scheduled for a 4:15 shuttle the next morning, so the goal became to keep her asleep on the walk back to the condo and transition her into the bed so she sleeps the night through.

I picked her up from the table and rest her head against my shoulder. While a rag doll in demeanor, she weighs as much as a sandbag. My back still hurts from this adventure as I type this. I had my wife place her jacket over her to serve as a blanket. The march began.

I was prepared to endure whatever pains and inconvenience I had to in order to get her into that bed asleep. I sang to her. Pet Sounds is my go-to. I rocked her on the escalator. Everytime she stirred and sighed I assured her, “Daddy’s here. Close your eyes.”

It was six o’clock, Colorado time, which meant bed time back home. As I changed her into her pajamas, I realized that her haphazard collapse at the inner table might put back on east-coast time in a seamless transition. Sometimes life works out like that, I thought.

I drew the blinds while holding her body—limp, heavy, and pajama-claid—with shaking arms. I laid her head down on the pillow and cued the white noise on my phone. For sleepers insurance, I laid in the bed next to hers. She doesn’t like to sleep alone.

Staring at the ceiling, I ran through the bedtime checklist and determined that I had done everything in my power to keep her asleep. Rest assured, I thought, maybe I could go to sleep early to prepare for my own 3:45 wakeup the next day.

Then my phone pinged. I neglected to switch it to Airplane Mode, thus inviting the notifications of my busy life to sound off on my daughter’s bedside table. I heard her shift. Too late already, I thought. Her seeing me standing—and conscious—would ignite her FOMO and raise her up and out of dreamland.

More texts arrived. Ping. Ping. Ping. I saw my daughter rub her eyes. She sealed my disappointment by saying, “Daddy. You woke me up!”

Even then I had to laugh. Here is this impressionable shot of life, my daughter, who, having passed out on her plate before shuttled across the length of an airport terminal to bed, hears a ringtone and blames me for disturbing her.

There’s a lot of recovery in there. Much of life too. As the sober days compile, I find it harder to distinguish between the two.

I could have cared less that my daughter accused me of doing the thing I broke my back in order to avoid. I just wanted her tired little body to get some rest.

Sleep is critical, but since nearly losing my life to addiction, I’ve enjoyed discovering what is more important a whole lot more.