The Sandman has one sick sense of humor.
I learned this last spring, around the time I turned 50, when my biological clock decided to set itself for a new time zone: menopause.
I'll pause here so any men reading this and shuddering can click onto the Sports Illustrated website.
Edging into menopause hasn't been as awful as I'd expected, except for the cruelties unleashed by that purveyor of sweet dreams and shuteye, the Sandman. Let me state for the record that I know the Sandman is not a real person; he's just someone I've chosen to pin the blame on for my miserable sleeping record these past 12 months. You know, the way you blame the weatherman when it rains on your day off.
Until last year I was a champion sleeper. As a child I once slept blissfully while my brother pounded energetically on his drum kit in the next room.
When my children were babies I learned to sleep upright with them in a rocking chair; when they grew older and came down with the flu I learned to doze between their sorrowful calls for drinks of water, cool, dampened washcloths, or the big plastic bucket.
I've learned to awaken and conk out again within seconds of a teenaged offspring returning home from a night out, their entrance announced by the glass-cracking bark of my dog Indy. I can sleep through thunderstorms raging overhead and cars backfiring in the street. I can hit the snooze button so many times my clock radio gives up trying to wake me.
My bedtime routine hasn't changed. Each night I pull back the comforter and crawl beneath, stretching across the mattress, my head sinking into the pillow like a maraschino cherry into the whipped cream on a sundae. I click off the light, say "Good night" to my dogs, and wait for sleep to descend, as it has unfailingly for most of the years of my life.
Enter the Sandman. I picture him as a thin fellow wearing a striped nightshirt and a droopy nightcap. His nightshirt glimmers with sleepy-dust residue.
He checks his list and shakes his head. "Hmm... Pascoe, Debra. Early 50s. Mother of three. Has a full-time job, a part-time writing gig, a high-energy dog, lots of friends... Let's give her six, no, five hours of sleep, disrupted by intermittent hot flashes."
The Sandman apparently harbors a subconscious, deep-seated hostility toward women.
So instead of dropping easily into dreamland, I toss and turn. I doze, then awaken abruptly, as if someone's shouted my name. Distractions I used to snore right through--a cat galloping around downstairs, a garbage truck groaning and screeching its way up the block--snap me back to consciousness like cold water thrown in my face.
About those hot flashes. Imagine you're a giant, glowing, incandescent, 1,000-watt light bulb. That's a hot flash. I throw back the blankets, causing the dogs to shift and grumble. I get up and gulp down a glass of cold water, then amble back to bed, keeping my eyes averted from the glowing orange numbers on my clock radio. Better not to know what time it is.
Knowing only sets me up for a rousing mental chorus of "You have to get up in X more hours. Hurry up and sleep! Hurry up and sleep!"
On nights like these I could really use backup. A visit from a more sympathetic apparition, Mother Nature, perhaps. Not some daisy-bedecked, love-and-peace-to-all Mother Nature, either. I need a
Mother. An Amazon figure of righteousness who will tower over that little snot of a Sandman and give him what for.
"Hey, Sandman! I hear you've been tormenting middle-aged women again."
"Yeah, what's it to ya?"
"Do you have any idea what it's like to be a woman, Sandy old boy? We get the kids off to school, get ourselves off to work, come home at night to a family who wants to know what's for dinner and then, if we're really lucky, we get to fold the laundry we washed and try to stay awake through an entire episode of 'Dancing With the Stars.' Do you really think we need you in the picture, disrupting the one single period of the day when no one is asking us for anything?"
"Lady, I'm just doing my job--ow!--what was that? A lightning bolt?"
"That's right, Sandy. And there's plenty more where that came from. Ever heard of hot flashes?"
I'm guessing this sleep issue isn't going to be resolved any time soon. But until it is, I'm going to try lulling myself to sleep with soothing little fantasies like this one. Who needs sheep when you can count lightning bolts?
Deb Pascoe of Marquette is a freelance writer and a peer recovery coach for Child and Family Services of the U.P. A former columnist for The Mining Journal, her book, "Life With a View," a collection of her past columns, is available in area bookstores.