There’s Nothing to Fix
Photo Courtesy | Megan Vos
BY MEGAN VOS
I am not sure if I can justifiably call the past two and a half years of bad sleep with my seven year-old a “phase.” After all, that’s about a quarter of her life. But when I talk about it, that’s what I say. “We’re in a bad sleep phase,” as if the solution is just one fix or one growth spurt away.
We have gone through many iterations of “fixing” during these years. We moved her furniture around and bought her a weighted blanket. We made homemade dream catchers. She slept on a camping pad and sleeping bag on our floor (and by “slept,” I mean “rolled around and kept me awake, or sat with her chin on the edge of my bed, two inches from my face, and waited for me to wake up”). My partner and I have taken turns sleeping on her floor when she wakes up. We’ve taken turns moving to the couch in the middle of the night so she can sleep in our bed. We’ve walked her back to bed over and over for hours. You name it; we’ve tried it.
Recently, my therapist and I explored my belief that it is my job to fix things, both for myself and also for the people around me. My dad left when I was eleven, and we maintained a cordial, if distant, relationship for the next thirty years until I recently decided to end our relationship. From my dad, I learned that I needed to be good in order for him to accept me. If I could only be a little more easygoing, our relationship would be better. Even though I knew intellectually that his rejection was not my fault, I internalized the belief that there was something about me that needed to be fixed. For years, my go-to fix was to restrict food or try a new diet masked as a “lifestyle change.” This fix distracted me from my feelings and came complete with rules. I wholeheartedly bought into the heady promise that becoming smaller would not only heal what was broken inside me, but would also make my life measurably better. My life, too, could be a series of before and after photos.
When the world feels overwhelming, it’s easy for me to convince myself that if my daughters will only let me brush and braid their hair, things will look a little brighter, or that if I can just adjust our schedule a bit, everything will be fine. With a decade of parenting behind me, I have fixed countless meals, minor injuries, and calendar mix-ups. I’ve been able to fix our lives with a quick email, or a text, or by signing up for summer camp the instant it opens. But during the pandemic, when life was largely unfixable, my belief that my worth is tied to my ability to fix was challenged again and again. When my therapist offered me the mantra, “There is nothing to fix,” it felt like a permission slip, an acknowledgment that the well-being of my family doesn’t depend on me controlling every aspect of our lives. That the size of my body does not reflect a moral success or failure on my part. That being a good mom does not require constantly improving myself and my children.
It’s hard to adopt this perspective in the moment, especially when the “moment” is 2 a.m. But it is also incredibly freeing. My daughter was anxious even before COVID, before the mass shooting at King Soopers a quarter mile from our home last year, before the wildfires ravaged our county this past winter, destroying over a thousand homes in a matter of hours. I can’t fix that my daughter still freezes when she hears a siren and has nightmares about the shooting. Over and over during the past couple of years, I’ve had to tell my daughter that I don’t know, that it’s impossible to explain, that there is no easy answer. “This is just really hard,” I’ll say. “I wish it were easier.”
My daughter’s sleep struggles are not completely surprising, circumstances aside. One of my mom’s famous lines is that I’ve never slept through the night; I just stopped needing her to be awake with me. In our family of origin, we all wake ridiculously early, and the quality of the sleep that precedes the early rising is questionable. We are spread out all over the country, but when we are together, waking up for our sacred first cup of coffee at 6 a.m., my mom, brother, and I often greet each other with “did you sleep?” The answer usually includes some combination of the time we fell asleep, the time we woke up and thought we’d fall back to sleep, and the plot twist of whether we miraculously managed another hour when we had resigned ourselves to a 3 a.m. start to the day.
I remember being a child and watching the clock turn from 12 to 1 to 2 a.m., and my worry even then about how tired I’d be the following day. My parents, too, tried to fix it, and there wasn’t a solution. On our way home from a sleep clinic when I was the age my daughter is now, my mom turned to my dad and said, “she’ll sleep when she sleeps.” When my parents divorced, my brother and I slept with our mom for years, and I grew up and went away to college, and then moved two thousand miles away. Now, when my children aren’t waking me, and my elderly dog doesn’t ask to go out at 4 a.m., I sometimes sleep. I did, however, draft this piece at 4:40 a.m., after waking up sandwiched between a sweaty child and a cuddly cat.
It’s a parenting trope to tell moms of young children to enjoy every moment. That we will miss these days. And while I do not think I will miss many aspects of parenting through a global pandemic with an anxious child while chronically sleep deprived, I understand the sentiment. Instead of implementing a new sleep plan, or googling yet another white noise app, l can make some space, both literally and figuratively, and pull her close. There is nothing to fix. One day, meeting my daughter’s needs won’t be as straightforward as lifting up the blanket and saying sleepily, “come on in.” I can imagine missing that.
MEGAN VOS lives in Boulder, CO with her partner and two daughters. She is currently editing her first middle grade novel and disproving her story that she doesn’t write fiction. She produces Listen to Your Mother, a live show featuring local writers’ stories about motherhood. Megan is also the Community Coordinator for Motherscope’s online community. Megan’s writing has been published in the Birth Stories, Radical Mama, and Generations issues of Motherscope, Kindred, Motherwell, and Journal of Expressive Writing. Follow Megan on Instagram at @meganvoswrites.