I could not fall asleep last night; let’s add a new symptom to the PMS roster. About once a month I now have insomnia. I lay in bed, just wired and anxious about all sorts of things, for no rational reason. I tried to combat it with prayer, but was only anxious about how much more comforting prayer is any other time of the month.
So, I grabbed my pillow, padded downstairs to the living room, made up a bed on the couch, turned on the tv and watched one of those Autopsy shows on HBO. You would think, “Well, that’s a dumb thing to watch if you’re feeling anxious,” but I happened to find it very soothing, in the first place, because my mind immediately ceased its own anxious whirlwind and in the second place, because I was comforted to see science in the service of justice. The fact that “the truth will out” is calming to me, even amidst the evil that men (and women) do and the cadavers, torsos, dismembered limbs and so forth.
I fell peacefully asleep at 4am, only to be awakened at 6 by my husband. “Your alarm went off,” he said. “Did you want to wake up?”
Ummm. . .not really, but I got up, made Kipp’s lunch, and asked my husband if he would get him off to school so that I could sleep in, to which he kindly agreed. The process of getting Kipp off to school always involves co-parenting to some degree—you feed him, I’ll dress him, you groom him, I’ll take him—each morning an easy little pas de deux. But when one of us is under the weather or affected by plummeting hormones, the other takes over quite easily.
Life often gives us what we don’t expect, in both good and bad ways. I never expected co-parenthood to such a degree, though I admit, I had the advantage of seeing my husband in parenting action, before I ever had children with him, and was quite amazed at his devotion and competence, which I suspect have something to do with his own father dying when he was just four years old.
1:36:44 PM 
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