Sleep Disturbances for Fatherless Children
It started out as insomnia initially. Long waking hours at night which warm milk, Sleepy Time Tea, and a trip to the doctor’s wouldn’t remedy. Weeks became months and have turned into over a year in which my middle son couldn’t sleep until well past his bedtime and mine. His feet paced the floor in his basement bedroom after he resigned himself to staying downstairs so as not to wake me.
School marks deteriorated, mood went from down to blah, and facing another day of school without enough sleep was like torture when one has to stay awake in class and actually concentrate enough to get what is being taught.
It took two years for his sleep pattern to improve, and now the pendulum has swung the opposite way. He sleeps way too much, which could be anything from 7 pm to 7 am or on some days, 5:30 pm to 7 am, leaving supper untouched and any semblance of family life unrecognizable other than a nod to the home he sleeps in.
The blank expression on his face and in his eyes was what initiated our first visit to the doctor, but once the good doctor realized I had already enrolled my son in counseling, he didn’t really treat him other than to run some blood work to test for the unknown.
The second visit to the doctor’s resulted in the doctor telling him that sleep is important for a teenager, which of course gave my son a more reputable reply to my worried concerns about his lengthy sleep hours.
I’ve tried to wake him up but it’s like waking a bear from hibernation, intruding on his lapse from reality so he can retreat in his cave of dreams and weary reprieve from the loss he faces every waking moment.
Some day I hope and pray his sleep will work its way into a normal eight to ten hours as even now he complains of fatigue regardless of how much sleep he absorbed.
His sister produced headaches as her response to the ongoing loss of her father, headaches that never showed their ugly head until later after he died.
Their oldest brother refuses counseling and thinks talking it over with friends and mentors is the way he deals best with it. He doesn’t get headaches, and he doesn’t deal with insomnia, and hey, 100 years ago we didn’t have psychologists and therapists to talk to. We’d chop a cord of wood and write in a diary and have enough physical labor facing us each day to sweat out our issues. Maybe that in the end is the best response, and some days I wish I had just sold our worldly goods and taken off to some backwoods place in the mountains of West Virginia until the earth and plants and nature had healed us sufficiently to face reality effectively again. I may have missed my conveniences but I wouldn’t have missed watching my children grieve in a world not running on a mourning timetable.
Oh, I just love your blog. Thank you for saying the things I don’t have the words for yet, but that are ahead of me. (I lost my husband in February, and have 12 and 13 year old boys).
Neither boy NEEDS counseling, mind you, and at best they roll their eyes at the mere mention of the possibility I might send them … on their bad days, their response is much less innocuous!
I wish you the best navigating this rocky road.
Linda http://twoboysfourcatsnodogsyet.blogspot.com/
(and by the way, I have a technical question about your blog: I like how your post has the comments form right there under the current post. Is this a feature of your layout? If so, are you using a layout template, and which one? And if not, can you send me the code to include the form? — And feel free to edit my comment …)
Thanks for your feedback.
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