It’s half term and I was ready for it. I’m tired. Tired like I’m trying to do a full time job but also leave school when the children do which necessitates a couple of hours' work every night once the boys are in bed, except their bedtimes creep ever later. Tired like I’m in some crazy pattern where I know I should be going to bed earlier because waking up in the morning will be horrible, but somehow never manage it.
Tiredness is relative, isn’t it? A friend with chronic fatigue told me (with a wry smile) that her husband sometimes tells her that he’s tired. He probably is. The thing is there is always someone more tired than you.
I’ve been tireder myself. Triple-feeding my eldest (a poor sleeper, with some health issues) was probably the period of my life I felt most exhausted. Like, hallucinating in the night and falling asleep in public places in the day, desperately desperate for any kind of nap, sort of tired. Two under two was also pretty tiring, as was three little ones and a part time job. On one occasion my eldest got up at 1.30am and got himself dressed for nursery, and I tried in vain to resettle him till 5.30am when son two woke up. I biked to work for 8.30am on only a couple of hours' sleep and having already put in a seven hour day.
My boys weren’t the best of sleepers (or, rather, I wasn’t the best at getting my boys to stay asleep) but at least that period did not last forever. Some of my fellow parents-in-arms had it much worse, or at least, bad for much longer.
My lovely friend Holly who blogs at https://mumoverboard.blogspot.com/ began one blog thus: “I realised recently that there was something different about my husband. Was it his eyebrows? A new fragrance? His culinary charm? And then it came to me: he wasn’t asleep on the floor anymore.
For the last two years [husband] has coped with torture-style sleep deprivation VERY well but with the unavoidable consequence of just nodding off whenever he stops moving. This had become really normal; the kids use him as soft play when he falls asleep face down on the rug.”
Funny, right? Poor, poor them. Their story gets much better, thankfully. But I also get that the tiredness that accompanies that stage of life, as bad as it is, is NOTHING, compared to the daily exhaustion that some people take for granted, sometimes for a lifetime. The burnout that accompanies chronic illness or stress, or just the prolonged and unbearable fatigue of the life of a poor labourer.
After the Industrial Revolution, when work ceased to be seasonal and regulated by daylight hours, it was common for working hours to be 14-16 hours a day, 6 days a week so that factories could optimise outputs and profits. I look at how I get to spend my weekends, maybe going to a café, walking a neighbour’s dog, and I have to admit, yes, a Victorian worker might have looked at my lying in on a Saturday morning and declared my life pretty restful.
And then there’s the bone-aching, never-ending exhausted lived daily reality of friends with chronic fatigue. They could really tell me a thing or two about tiredness, but they’re too polite to.
It’s not really the done thing, is it, telling someone tired that it could be worse?
I’m not sure I’d go back and tell my newly qualified teacher self, a puddle of despair as I tried to plan every lesson, mark mark mark till the early hours, fix up a house, and plan a wedding, “You think this is bad – wait till you have a baby!”
Feeling tired is tricky enough. We need sympathy, not “who wins the last brownie” misery.
We read in the gospels about a Jesus who got tired. Mark records: “Then Jesus said, ‘Let’s go off by ourselves to a quiet place and rest awhile.’" (6:31) Jesus' response to the tiredness caused by a busy role coping with the demands of lots of people, was to prioritise ways to rest, and to connect with the Creator God who ordained a pattern of rest, who even worked it in to the rhythm of creation. This same Jesus invites us:
And I’m sure I could learn something from this if I weren’t so sleepy.
More on trying to do too much here: https://sarahhadfi.wixsite.com/website/post/on-finding-validation-in-strange-places and here: https://sarahhadfi.wixsite.com/website/post/on-running
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