There's something I've noticed over the last month or two. It's been very gradual. Well, first, a bit of context. $sprog likes to get up early; as far as I can tell, he's really just a very larkish person at this time in his little 4 year old life. We've tried all the things the various sleep books tell you to do if you want to try and move your kid's sleep schedule a bit later, and they don't appear to have any effect. So, I just get up at 6 with him, and that's the way it goes, every day, 7 days a week (yes yes, I'm either insane or a martyr—actually neither, but that's a different post).
I'll admit, there have been times over the course of my life as a parent so far where I've been really, really resentful of this. Super grumpy. Especially at the crack of dawn when it's actually happening. I think a big part of this has been coming from what it actually feels like to be roused from sleep at that time of day; that's obviously not an unreasonable assumption, but here's the thing: lately, both kids have been getting up even earlier—like, instead of sleeping in till 7:00 or even 7:30 most days and then getting up super early once or twice a week (ha! 7-7:30 feels like sleeping in!), they're now getting up between 5 and 6 pretty much every day. Since they sleep in the same room together, one quite frequently wakes the other one up and then they're off to the races: chatting, laughing, playing little making-faces games at each other through the crib bars, etc. It would be unbearably cute if my first thought on being woken up by this at 5:30am weren't OMG TIRED WAAAAH MY POOR SAD LIFE. True, sometimes $sprog gets up and quietly sneaks out of his room, and we sneak downstairs and I let him watch a DVD with a bowl of cereal while I snooze on the couch till 7 (does that make me a bad father?). But either way, that physical sensation of being woken up waaay too early—that hollow feeling at the back of my head—has become a very familiar one. Coupled with the heaviness around the eyes, the dizziness, dry throat, and other unpleasantness associated with lack of sleep, it hasn't been easy; the resentment was somehow bound up in all those physical sensations for me.
Anyway, the weird thing is, since they've started getting up even earlier than they did before, somehow that unpleasant physical sensation, and with it, the resentment, has just evaporated. I don't know whether I'm going to bed earlier than before—I don't think so. I didn't sit myself down and say "You need to just be less resentful about this, they're just kids, and besides, this is your chance to enjoy them at their cutest (they're in the best mood of the day first thing when they wake up), so quitcherbitchin'"—in fact, I only kind of figured that out post-hoc, rationalizing as I've noticed the resentment declining over the past month or two. Rather, it feels like it's gone in the other order: somehow my actual need for sleep has changed, and that's led to a decrease in the physical sensations, which has led to a decrease in resentment, which has allowed room for me to notice how fun it is to spend time with these little dudes at 6am.
I think the key, though, is in my own perception of my "actual need for sleep". Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn have a whole piece about this in the excellent Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, which I read over a year ago, and at which I rolled my eyes at the time. They gently suggest that one's perceived "need" for sleep has much more to do with habit (and a sense of territorial entitlement and control—ripe ground for conflict with one's kids) than with any actual physical requirement. I'm still not 100% certain whether what's changing for me is my "actual" physical need, or my attitude about sleep, but something is certainly changing, and I think it's for the better. I'm inclined to suspect it's more about the attitude—after all, I still feel pretty much the same level of tired I have all along, if not slightly more so. But something about the tenor of the feeling has changed; I'm just not so viscerally upset about it as I used to be when I haul myself out of bed at 5:30am. I'm not exactly happy about it, and it's not a feeling of acquiescence, either. It's more of an active process of realizing that getting upset about this isn't going to change it, combined with a deep confidence that I actually didn't need more sleep.
This, of course, leads to further speculation: if I don't actually need something to which I've been clinging so tightly for several years now; if mental habits are so strong in me as to create perceived physical sensations and needs (and I've seen this kind of thing over and over again in my life); then who knows what other things that I think are so important actually don't matter so much? Conversely, what things am I fooling myself into thinking aren't important to me, but actually matter a great deal? The risk of second-guessing myself and totally shredding my own self confidence looms large, and probably wouldn't be terribly useful if taken to an extreme. But, I do think it's instructive to notice how easy, and how pervasive this kind of self-deception is.
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