The Best Part of Healing My Insomnia

nothing is worth closing your heart over

The hands-down best part of healing my debilitating insomnia has not been getting decent sleep and feeling less like a miserable zombie all the time (although that is great), it is being able to fall asleep one inch away from my four year old daughter while her warm breath blesses my face like a baptism.

Laying there with nothing but her sleeping, precious, perfect face in my view, while my eyes slowly close and I drift into deep sleep is a gift beyond all other gifts.

It was one of the most truly terrible things to not be able to fall to sleep while next to my babies. To have every little movement or noise jerk me awake like a someone had just blown a fog horn in my face.

When I was deep in my insomnia (wrote about this here and here and here) it was impossible to sleep without absolutely perfect conditions and, even then, rarely would I sleep well.

I needed the room to dark and cool and completely quiet.

If anyone touched me I wanted to scream and kick and would take another hour to calm back down.

I had to sleep completely alone for six months when my babies were 8 months and 2.5 years old, just to get any semblance of what one might call “sleep.”

Insomnia is pure torture in and of itself, but the not being able to sleep in the same bed as my babies was a cavernous source of pain for me.

It wasn’t just that I deeply believe co-sleeping is one of the most important and healthy things we can do for our kids.

It wasn’t just a mental expectation I had or a set of principals I wanted to uphold or a preferencial thing.

It wasn’t only that I felt guilty and so badly wanted the reality of my needs to be different. Although all these are true too.

It was simply grief-full. My heart so badly wanted to be close to them. My body yearned to snuggle, cuddle, and entwine with them when they were so young and we were so solidly in that tender period of the mother-baby dyad.

But, at that moment in time, my system was entirely upreglated to the point, I could not recieve the warmth, softness, and slowness it would have required me to be able to let go and allow the sweetness in and really be in it and fall into sleep beside it.

There are so many reasons for this. In a lot of ways, this is all I write about, my personal journey towards opening, softening, releasing, and recieving.

On a physical level, my nervous system was fried. My hormones were completely out of whack; low progesterone, high estrogen. I needed the oxytoxin that the cuddling would give me, but somehow I could not create it or recieve it or sink into it.

The cuddle hormone, oxytoxin, has long been something that hasn’t quite turned on for me. I am not really a cuddler. I don’t particularly feel soothed by touch.

I have thought long and hard about the cortisol (and stress hormones in general) and oxytoxin connection. If only I would have taken the first 40 days rest postpartum more seriously and spent more time in bed resting and snuggling initially, maybe I would not have been in this situation?

But the truth was, the moments after I gave birth both times, after that initial releif and heart explosion, I was anxious almost immediately. I was hypervigilant. I was majorly, majorly activated. The oxytoxin bliss people speak of postpartum was never my experience.

Unlike so many women, I was deeply fortunate during my pregnancy care, birth, and postpartum to feel very supported. I had plenty of help around me. My births were pretty much perfect and as easeful as they can be. There was no birth trauma or plans gone awry. But still, I could not relax postpartum. I felt constantly on edge.

I experienced some insomnia with my first, but it was after my second was born that the debiliatating level of zero sleep started. I had conceived, gestated, grown, and birthed two humans in the matter of a couple years. Just to give those of you who can understand, I was pregnant again when my first was 6 months old. That’s how quick a turnaround we’re talking here.

Pre-pregnancy, except for just a few nourishing years before I got pregnant, I had dramatically under eaten compared to my high activity and productivity levels for my entire teenage and adult life, used hard drugs often and copiously, drank alcohol heavily, and generally pushed myself and my body way, way harder than anyone should ever push their body.

My crash into burnout and drastic physical symptoms, like insomnia, from that burnout, was inevitable when you really look at where I was coming from.

In hindsight, I understand that my body had to do something as drastic as not let me sleep for a year and gaining 80lbs, so that I would actually pay attention. It had been whispering and knocking at my door for years. At some point something has got to give. The spike strip is required to stop the car speeding out of control down the high way, the orange cones aren’t going to cut it.

And so, I was put through one of the most difficult iniations of my life. Learning to let go of who I thought was and how I thought I would be as a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, a practitioner, a business owner, a woman. As I learned to let go of so many of expectations and identities, I was also having to relearn how to let go into sleep.

So many pieces have supported me on my journey to healing insomnia. Mineral Nutritional Balancing is a big one. Quantum biology principles and redesigning my life around day and night and seasonal rhythyms was another. Eating enough, at the right times of day, consistently, helped so much. Learning how to truly rest preemptively and regularly, before I collapse, is another.

As much as not sleeping with my girls during this time hurt me, there was no doubt it was what I needed to do at the time. It was such a deep lesson in understanding how much my well being as the mother needs to be tended to.

Whatever is truly best for the mother will also be best for the children and family. That’s our design. That is how we have evolved and survived for thousands of years. If pregnancy, postpartum, and motherhood was inherently depleting we would not be here.

It can seem quite conunterintuitive at times, but I know that I needed this lesson and experience to be the mother I am today and to become the mother that my future children will need.

It’s all part of a mysterious and beautiful process, pulling me forward toward my own (and my children’s own) becoming.

And now, I fall sleep with one daughter tucked under each arm. We fall asleep together, entwined. My oldest told me tonight, “Mama, your arm is more comfortable to me than a pillow.”

The sweetness and the cuddles do not escape me. I am sipping them up and letting them warm me from the inside out, like hot coco with marshmellows on a cold winter afternoon.

Now, I am flooded with oxytoxin.

I am healing myself backwards and forwards by sleeping right between my almost-four-year old and my five year old each night. I am healing that anxious, postpartum mother who could not let go.

I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to sleep with their kids. Laying with them is one of my most favorite times of day, no matter how annoyed, frustrated, or overwhelmed I was with them during the day, the bedtime snuggle-sesh brings me back to the softness of life, the beauty, the holy preciousness, I am in the midst of.

It brings me back to the gratitude of how far I’ve come and how far we’ve come.

Holding their hot little hands.

Staring at their little beloved faces.

Watching their chests rise and fall and blessing every single centimeter of them over and over again until I’m swept into a deep and restorative sleep, myself.

Letting their little grunts, coughs, and sighs (and yes, sometimes full on screams or night wakings) not be something of torment, but of delightful reminders that I am a mother to two wonderful beings.

It doesn’t get any better than this.

May I hold these moments of beauty in my body and use them to come back to and flood my blood with oxytoxin, love, and the knowing that nothing is worth closing your heart over.