Bedtime Blues

I'm not good at sleeping by myself. I frequently have nightmares, wrestle with bouts of major insomnia, and generally feel anxious when I'm trying to fall asleep alone. Part of the problem is childhood traumas that still haunt me, make me fearful of going to sleep and being utterly vulnerable. If I'm forced to sleep alone, I have to make a nest of pillows around me so that I get some semblance of my "back" being protected. When my husband is in bed with me, I have to have his back against me in order to relax enough to fall asleep. It's pretty silly, really, to carry such a thing around for so long but I know it will be one of the most difficult things to purge from year forty-five. Those fears go very, very deep and unlike with other things I can't just psyche myself out because that would require too much focused concentration, ergo leading to those insomnia issues.

Back when my  husband would go on long deployments, I spent days, weeks, months extremely sleep-deprived. I knew I was the one solely responsible for keeping our girls safe while he was gone and I was by God not going to fail at that task. I would often worry something would happen in the middle of the night, they would need me, and I wouldn't wake up in time to be there...so, I stayed awake. I'd nap sometimes when they were at school, but at night I'd rarely sleep and almost never for an entire night. When they were toddlers, I'd check on them every couple of hours and sometimes just stand at their door watching them sleep, reminding myself they were safe.

How do you cure a fear that feels like it's encoded into your brain? How do you assure yourself that it's okay to just let go and trust that nothing bad will happen during the night while you are completely unaware? Those are questions I continue to grapple with. As for tonight, I will just exhaust myself until I'm too tired to notice as much that the bed, the room, the night feels empty. If that fails, C-Span is pretty good at chasing away the bedtime blues...and boring me into a coma!