One baby makes a girl tired. Two babies in 17 months makes a girl tired. Three babies in four years . . . You get the idea. I’ve been tired since just before my 20th birthday. Normal tired. Feel-better-with-a-nap tired.
This past year I learned the difference between “tired” and “weary.”
Naps don’t fix weariness. Ativan doesn’t fix weariness. I don’t know firsthand if lots of nights of really great sleep fix weariness, but I sort of doubt it.
This weariness, this full-body exhaustion, is different from the years spent rocking and nursing instead of sleeping or the years of full-time college with three young children. It’s even different from zombie-like production weeks. With every other level of tired, I knew it would end. I’d sleep in on a Saturday morning, the babies would sleep through the night, the semester would end or the show would close.
But this? I see no end—no resolution. My body is mourning. Can bodies be sad? Not “She’s really let herself go. How sad.” Obviously that can happen and that I could fix. Just . . . sad. Can an entire body weep, be wrung out? Because that’s how it feels. Not every day, but enough days. This day.
My eyes are washed out, maybe red from crying; my second-day hair is stringy. The grey can have its say. The little makeup I still wear (masks and makeup aren’t compatible) doesn’t hide the dark circles or the lines.
Most of the above-the-shoulder blah-ness could be written off to the delights of middle age (and laziness), but the true weariness is in my leaden shoes and rounded shoulders, my slow walk and defeated posture. It’s in my midnight eyes, stinging, staring at the darkness and the puff of these late-night exhalations, a silent cry with each breath. It’s in the words I swallow because speaking them is too much work.
It’s exhausting, this weariness. I know, I know—that sounds redundant, but it’s true. I am weary of being weary. I want to feel better; I wish I knew a remedy that didn’t involve time, but I’ve consulted experts in the field—my trusted Moms Who Know—and time is a necessary ingredient in the weariness antidote. No magic.
My normal tiredness was fixed in time, too. Those babies grew into independent teenagers and then adults. Weekends and sleeping in happened. I recharged over a three-day weekend or Christmas break or a glorious summer. It all took time.
I hope and pray and want to believe this weariness will ease in time or—as with other effects of great loss—I’ll adjust. Maybe in time I’ll be less aware of this dulling and dragging down of my everything, just as I was in those years of the interrupted sleep of young parents.
This terrible exhaustion is yet another surprise in grief. I’ll add it to the list of things unwanted and unrequested—rude visitors that will not leave my life. I’m trying and learning to work around or possibly coexist with with weariness. Until enough time passes or I figure out a trick, this is just my face.
Woods Writes 