It Is Always Darkest Before The Dawn

"Mama, what's vacation mean?"

"It's when you go somewhere....and you don't ever come back"

That's what Forrest Gump's mama tells him when he asks where his daddy went. As I sat at the dinner table with my husband and daughters telling them mommy was going on vacation - without them - I feared they would think I wasn't coming back.

It's truly a case of projecting my own fears on my offspring. For some reason, as motherhood loomed, I began to fear I would abandon my children - how this fear came about, I have no idea. After I became a mother, the fear became less acute.

For the most part.

I discovered how debilitating the combination of depression and sleep deprivation can be in the eleventh month of my girls' lives. Neither had slept through the night and we were nearing the end of winter cold season, which had blurred together in a seemingly endless torture of coughing and runny noses.

I developed an anxiety response to my own bed. Every time I would lie down, exhausted, feeling unable to move another muscle, I would hear a cry, soft at first, but just enough to instill that first ounce of dread.

My mind started to play tricks on me - did I hear a baby crying? Or was that a dog barking down the street? There is a moment I remember perfectly: Early one morning before dawn had broke, the cries began and my brain scrambled for a solution like scrolling through rolodex cards, none offering anything worthy or realistic. Then it hit me: I would have to give them up for adoption.

The very next night, they both slept through the night.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. It wasn't a conscious desire, per se, but more a solution to a problem. With each passing day, week and month, my anxiety of my own bed lifted, but remained a ghost in my psyche, always there to remind me how valuable uninterrupted sleep is to the human mind.