Help! I Think My Mom Has Sleeping Sickness!

Life would be much easier if babies like to chill
and watch Netflix!

My mom is a very busy lady. Three days a week she looks after my eight month old niece, Olive, from around 7:30 in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon. And, if you have any experience with babies, then you know that babies do not like to just lounge on the couch and watch Netflix. They are constantly moving around, plus you always have to protect them from doing things like chewing on the dog toys, and sticking their fingers in the electrical sockets.

When she is not looking after Olive she is helping her parents out, looking after hers and my dad’s pets (right now they have five cats because my older brother’s two cats are staying with them), checking on my pets or my younger brother’s pets, running errands, keeping the house neat, or doing nice things for us, like taking my dog, Betty, to the vet so that when I get done with work at 5:30 I can go home instead of to the vet’s, and picking up groceries that we need when she is at the grocery store. So, basically, my mom is Superwoman, only she doesn’t wear the cool cape and she can’t fly (at least not that I know of).

She is always doing something, always moving, always rushing from one place to another—and the woman never complains. I mean, like, never. If I were her, I would probably be telling everyone I came across about how tired I was, from the pharmacist at Rite-Aid to my cats. Aside from the fact that she never gets a chance to sit down, my mom is also tired because she hardly ever sleeps. Something about not being able to sleep seems to run in my family. Like me, my mom wakes up dozens of times a night for no good reason. Also, she goes to bed late, and gets up just before 5 AM to go walk the dogs with my dad and me. So, my mom basically has to catch her 40 winks whenever there is a little extra time, which makes watching tv and movies with her very interesting.

Often, in the evenings, I will go to my parents’ house to eat dinner and/or watch tv. My parents have Xfinity, which has awesome On Demand programming. (I have AT&T Uverse which, while it provides good service, has abysmal On-Demand choices). When I watch tv with my parents it is like having a cornucopia of television shows at my fingertips. My mom DVR’s shows that she likes or that I like, or that she thinks one of us will like, and then we watch them on many evenings. I try to encourage my mom to go ahead and get ready for bed before we commence the viewing, because having to get a shower when it’s late and you are exhausted is really unpleasant, plus, if she has already had her shower she can go straight to bed once we finish our tv marathon.

Recently, my mom has been displaying signs of narcolepsy, or sleeping sickness, or whatever you want to call it, whenever we watch tv together. She will stretch out on the orange couch in front of the tv, and will play around on her phone as we watch. After a few minutes, I realize that it is totally silent in the room, save for the dialogue on the show, and I will look over and notice that my mom is sleeping with her phone sitting right under her face. “Mom,” I will say, “You’re asleep.” She will then wake up and proceed to tell me that she knows exactly what is going on in the show, but that she wants to “go back just a little,” at which point she will rewind the show. And because rewinding a show with the Xfinity remote is like launching a turbo-propelled rocket, we will end up all the way back at the beginning of the show by accident.

Both Olive and my mom fight sleep
with the fury of a ticked off King Kong!

I will tell my mom that she should go to bed, and that I will go home, but she is adamant that she does not want to go to sleep. Sometimes I will even say, “Mom, let’s go lie down on your bed,” you know, to get her back on her bed so I can let her fall asleep and then leave, but she still insists on trying to stay awake. I sometimes see Olive do this, when she is really tired, but there is just too much interesting stuff going on for there to be time to sleep. Olive will fight sleep like she is King Kong in that scene where he fights the dinosaur. Maybe this condition is contagious, and my mom has picked it up from Olive because she spends so much time with her. If I ever do try to sneak out of my mom’s bedroom when she has fallen asleep, she will wake up, as she has the ears of a bat, and she will insist on walking me to the door when I actually do leave.

And, if you thought my mom’s sleeping sickness was bad when she’s at her house, you should see her when she comes to my house. I have one nice, large, flat screen tv, and it is in my bedroom. Therefore, when we watch tv we lie on my bed. My bed, which I must tell you, has to be the most comfortable bed in the whole world, casts some sort of spell on my mom, and within about five minutes she is fast asleep. When she’s at my house I don’t even try to wake her up, because she is just out again ten seconds later. Eventually I wake her up so she can go home and properly go to bed, but she seems to nap quite wonderfully when she lies on my bed. Plus, sometimes she even says entertaining things while she sleeps. Like, one time, she told me that if I wanted to get to my goal weight that the only important thing was for me to drink water—lots and lots of water. While this wasn’t quite as entertaining as that time my dad talked in his sleep, it was still a good start.

Clearly, my mom is sleep-deprived. I have tried suggesting that she just go to bed early, or that she take a nap in the late afternoon, but my mom is not one to ever just rest or take time for herself. I wish she were, but she just isn’t. This is what makes me think that my mom is made of more formidable stuff than I am; I am always lying down on my bed to rest when I get home from work, and you don’t have to tell me twice to take a nap! I also think this difference between my mom and myself may be generational, as I think each successive generation gets less and less tough.

So, barring the off chance that my mom does, indeed, have narcolepsy or sleeping sickness, I would say she just needs like a week where she can go to bed whenever she wants and wake up whenever she wants. But, even if given these freedoms I doubt she would take advantage of them. In fact, I may actually have to slip her an Ambien to get her to slumber, but she never has eight full hours available to devote to sleep, so I guess that wouldn’t work. In the meantime, I will just let her sleep while we watch tv, and prevent her from operating heavy machinery.

Netflix image courtesy of http://mykidisspecial.blogspot.com/p/shows-to-watch-on-netflix.html
King Kong image courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kong_(comics)