Missed the original question, but I gather that someone whose kids are still
small asked us "older" lactnetters (harrumph!) what it's like to get 8
straight hours of sleep a night?

I can only laugh! Hard and long! And point out that the time you can
*REALLY* expect to be awake at night is when your now-babies are teenagers -
their infancy night-time awakenings are *nothing* compared to the worrying
you can do about a teen (or two, or 6, as I at one time had in my
household!) out at night. Out with your CAR, or even worse, someone else's
car, or worse than that, with someone else AND someone else's car and you
can't know that the someone else driving can be trusted to not be "under the
influence", or that someone else out there on the road with your kids
won't.....Or, equally destructive of sleep, when the teenagers and their
multitude of friends troop in & out of the house all night, because they
know you are happy to have them all safe under your roof......Or when
they're home, each safely tucked (alone!) into their little beds, but you're
lying there wide awake trying to solve (in your own mind alone, because of
course you wouldn't dare try to tell them what to do!) the problems with
friends or school or life you know they're facing.......Or you know they are
in real pain because of the death of a friend or destructive behaviours of
other friends......Or they're off at college or new jobs in distant places,
and you can't decide which is worse: they're lying there all alone, far from
home, brooding over their problems & feeling shy and scared, or they're out
till all hours of the night having fun doing who-knows-what....Or - well,
you get the idea!

And I don't remember getting all that much sleep in the years between
infancy and teenagerhood, come to think of it. There are always the bad
dreams, or the ear ache,  or the calls from the sleepover to get picked up
because so-and-so said such-and-such. Believe me, it's always something!

And, just about when you've got them all cleared out and settled pretty
well - guess what happens then? Hot flashes, night sweats,
middle-of-the-night peeing (who knew women peed that much at night?), and
plain old hours of spontaneous waking up "for no reason".  I am learning now
to take these big "black holes" of awakeness at night as one of the gifts of
a woman's middle years, a time to work on perhaps developing some wisdom. I
use those hours happily for meditation and contemplation, or reading (except
that my DH can't sleep with even a little tiny special book-light on, and I
can't quite bear to leave the bed when he's in it), or (my favorite!) long
hot baths. Sometimes my nights are more active than my days!

I've learned a lot about "normal" sleep patterns from Kathy D's writings,
and that of other anthropologists. Here's my take on why "sleep deprivation"
is such a huge, huge problem in today's society: we have too much to do in
the daytime. We try to do way, way more than we're meant to, and much of
what we do is so "important" (or so we, of course, think) and/or on someone
else's schedule. A lot of it is what I think of as "fake" - it's what we're
led to believe we have to do. Don't believe it!

Cathy Bargar RN IBCLC
Ithaca NY

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