Why does worry seem to culminate in the wee hours of the morning when a person is supposed to be sleeping? What is it about the dream world or the unconscious mind that can wake a grown man from slumber and refuse him re-entry? I have fought to get back to sleep for the past three hours and I hope by expressing myself here in a letter to you I can clear my mind. Perhaps then I can seize the few precious minutes of slumber left in the morning.
You seem to be tossing and turning yourself. We still have the sound monitors in your room and I am pretty sure you have changed positions and wrestled around no less than a dozen times since I have been awake. Occasionally, you have mumbled something that must make perfect sense in your dream but even when I hear it clearly the meaning eludes me. At least you are in that dream state where your mind processes and flushes all the superfluous fragments left over thus restoring it to a clean slate. It makes me jealous because my fragments keep coming back like razor sharp boomerangs.
Your mother is up too, or at least she was when I went down. I swore I heard one of her alarms on her phone go off but perhaps that was in my head and I think I was already semi-awake at that point so I can't blame that for waking me. Your mom is sleeping downstairs because it is easier with her medical situation. She must be in and out of sleep because the TV is still running with some horrible infomercial. I would go down to turn it off for her, but that would just startle her awake. Plus she probably needs the light from the TV as she wakes through the night for various medical things.
As for me, I am still being barraged by thought after thought. My mind travels freely from work, to family, to God, to neighbor, to Crohn's, to payroll systems, to volunteering, to prayer, to you, to each of your grandparents, to Mrs. Gloria next door who was taken in an ambulance today, to friends I haven't seen in years, to pending surgeries, to how to calculate the overtime in the new payroll system at work, to sin, to life, to politics, to crime, to retirement savings, to love, and everything in between. As you can see there is no rhyme or reason and my brain is currently the definition of non-sequitur. I have tried most every technique I know to get back to sleep tonight, except for pharmaceuticals. There is just over an hour left before you wake for school so it is almost pointless at this point. Saying the Rosary is usually my final goto in order to find peace and calm so I can sleep. No joy.
I suppose all these thoughts and worries are being pushed to the night because they might totally debilitate me throughout the day. Getting a couple hours sleep somehow triggers this thought parade. I wish it would just come at me in some weird deep R.E.M. state dream that I could laugh about or try to figure out in the morning, instead, quite rudely, it decides to wake me and keep me awake. I wish I had advice on how to deal with this for when you run into it when you're a dad. Instead I just offer this example so you know that it happens to the best of us.
Sincerely with love from your dad,
Leo
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