Yes Please (19 page)

bad sleeper

S
LEEP AND I DO NOT HAVE A GOOD RELATIONSHIP
.
We have never been friends. I am constantly chasing sleep and then pushing it away. A good night’s sleep is my white whale. Like Ahab, I am also a total drama queen about it. I love to talk about how little sleep I get. I brag about it, as if it is a true indication of how hard I work. But I truly suffer at night. Bedtime is fraught with fear and disappointment. When it is just me alone with my restless body and mind, I feel like the whole world is asleep and gone. It’s very lonely. I am tired of being tired and talking about how tired I am.

The phrase “going to sleep” has always given me great anxiety. I don’t like doing things I am bad at, and I have been told since I was very young that I am a bad sleeper. As soon as I become prone, my head will begin to unpack. My mind will turn on and start to hum, which is the opposite of what you need when you begin to switch off. It is as if I were waiting the whole day for this moment. Trying to go to sleep is often when I feel most engaged and alive. My brain starts to trick me into thinking this is the moment it should turn on and start working overtime. It is a problem. I need some rest. I have a lot to do.

Our parents surround us with origin stories that create deep grooves in the vinyl records of our lives. Mine included the simple fact of how little I slept as a baby. My mom and dad nicknamed me “Tweety Bird” because I was a tiny not-quite-six pounds, had big eyes, and was bald until I was two. I was told I resembled a cartoon chicken, which is still true, especially after a rough weekend. My parents tell stories about my staring at them from the crib at all hours of the night. Sounds pretty creepy, right? A pale, bald, and tiny baby bird peering out through the slats of its cage, challenging the adults to an all-night staring contest? By all accounts I came home and my parents didn’t sleep again for another ten years. I was born in a different time. Women still smoked when pregnant and no one talked about folic acid. Kale wasn’t even invented yet! My mother, who was constantly nauseous, was encouraged to keep her weight down by her doctors. She gained only eighteen pounds during her pregnancy with me, a fact she was very proud of and told me repeatedly while I was pregnant for the second time and forty pounds overweight. She may have stopped after I threatened to dropkick her into the neighbor’s yard if she mentioned it again. My mother was also a tiny baby, and my grandmother (another petite flower) used to brag that she would put my mother to sleep inside a dresser drawer. It seems like in the olden times people loved to stick their babies in strange places and then brag about where they fit. My father also told me a story about using a warm baked potato as some kind of mitten. I don’t know. Things were weird back then. Whatever the case, I was small and a bad sleeper and these labels have stuck.

At a young age I would grind my teeth and snore. I sleep-laughed and sleep-talked. I didn’t sleepwalk, but I sleep-scared my brother, Greg. We would sleep in the same bed on Christmas Eve, too excited to be apart. He was three years younger and would easily fall asleep while I did my usual ritual of spending two to three hours going over lists in my head, worrying about my family, and then reading Nancy Drew books with a flashlight. One Christmas morning Greg, who was five at the time, woke me up to go downstairs. I looked at him and said, “Okay, let’s go wake up Greg.” He looked at me with his big kindergarten eyes and nervously said, “I am Greg!” From then on our family has used the phrase “I am Greg!” any time one of us is having an existential breakdown. One Christmas, when we were a bit older, Greg and I got up in the middle of the night and turned all the clocks in the house ahead a few hours. We woke up our parents and opened presents until they finally realized it was pitch-black even though the clocks read eight thirty
A.M
.

Sleepovers were a big thing when I was young. Sleepovers were girl summits—confabs where we all snuggled next to each other and decided who we were going to be. They were also stressful social experiments. I had two wonderful friends growing up whom I still consider my close friends. I met Kristin Umile in second grade. She was shorter than me, which was a big deal. She was half Italian and talked a mile a minute. She won the superlative “cutest” in both middle school and high school but was incredibly well liked, which gives you a sense of her wonderfulness. Andrea Mahoney, whom I called Sis, was the social quarterback of the whole school. She came from a warm Irish family with lots of older brothers and sisters, and she was a pretty athlete who made everyone feel welcome wherever we were. I was lucky to be included in that sandwich. As we would line our Snoopy sleeping bags up next to each other I would sink into the relief I felt from having friends like these girls. Smart. Patient. Good daughters and sisters. That’s who I ran with. That being said, I still went through the young-girl rites of passage, including being kicked out of the group. Almost every girl goes through this weird living nightmare, where you show up at school and realize people have grown to hate you overnight. It’s a
Twilight Zone
moment when you can’t figure out what is real. It is a group mind-fuck of the highest kind, and it makes or breaks you. I got through it by keeping my head down, and a few weeks passed and all the girls liked me again. We all pretended it never happened. There should be manuals passed out to teach girls how to handle that inevitable one-week stretch when up is down and the best friend who just slept over at your house suddenly pulls your hair in front of everyone and laughs.

The nerves of suddenly being a social outcast would be enough to keep me up, as well as my terrible snoring and overall unattractive sleeping style. Ever since I was a young girl I’ve snored and drooled and slept with my mouth wide open. It wasn’t pretty, and at eleven, pretty can be important. At sleepovers I would often be the last girl standing. Everyone would fall asleep while I stared at the ceiling. Sometimes I would tiptoe around and watch everyone sleep. After tossing and turning, I would lightly snoop around and then put on my coat and sneak outside. I watched more than one sunrise in a strange suburban driveway. Then I would sleep late and wake up to an empty house and a mother who would reluctantly mix up a new batch of pancakes.

My first-period class in high school started at seven thirty
A.M
. We lived in a ranch house with two bathrooms and my mom taught special ed at our high school, so Mom, Greg, and I would be angling for the shower at the same time. I would snooze until the last possible second and then rush to get ready. My hair would still be wet and often frozen by the time I walked from my house to the car of whatever friend was driving me to school. I never rode with my mom. I generally preferred to ride with Rob, who played his U2 cassettes and wore acid-wash jeans. I would fight sleep in my first couple of classes, until lunch came at 10:20
A.M
., when I would eat the ten thousand calories given to every American teenager. I would get home from school at 1:45 and crash hard on the couch, waking up only to watch my beloved
General Hospital
or do homework or sluggishly walk to softball practice. I was always tired. I am always tired. I now read articles about how great sleep is and how important it is and I cry because I want it so bad and I am so mad at how great everyone else seems to be at it.

I got some relief from my sleep problem once I started working at
SNL
(this sounds crazy, I realize that). It was truly a vampire life and one that suited my internal clock. At the time I did not have children, so I was able to stay up very late and sleep very late. I remember ten
A.M.
feeling incredibly early and three
A.M
. being my usual bedtime. This was my life for seven years. New York City is the perfect place to be awake in the middle of the night. I would rub shoulders with the nurses and truck drivers. I would watch newspapers being delivered and the workout maniacs getting in their first runs of the day. I would watch wired rich kids stumble out of clubs and old Italian men water down the sidewalks. Being awake and sober at four
A.M
. is a much different experience from being wasted and stumbling home. I have certainly done both. I remember a particularly awful night when I went to a club and stayed out all night, only to have to shoot a commercial parody the next morning. I was tired and wired as I shivered in a freezing trailer getting a spray tan to look like Fergie. The host that week was Jon Heder and we were supposed to be playing the Black Eyed Peas. We had to dance in the middle of a New Jersey highway at six
A.M
. I think Jon was the only one who had slept the previous night. Kenan Thompson kept pretending to take calls from himself asking why he had done this to himself. It was a long day.

But nothing during my
SNL
years prepared me for children.

The thing about little babies is that you are always afraid they are going to die. At least in the beginning. You are constantly checking to make sure they didn’t die and you haven’t killed them. Because of this, it’s truly impossible to sleep when you are a new mother. The other thing about little babies is that you don’t get the weekends off. You don’t get a Saturday where you can catch up. The sleep deprivation after children is so real. I liken it to what it must feel like to walk on the moon and to cry the whole time because you had heard that the moon was supposed to be great but in truth it totally sucks. I started working on
Parks and Recreation
when my first child, Archie, was three months old, and I can remember a few times when I fell asleep standing up, with my eyes open. I slept wherever I could. Twenty minutes at lunch. During production meetings. In my car. I remember being filled with rage when childless people would talk about brunch. I had my second son, Abel, and aged a hundred years in his first year. I had a hard time getting my body back after baby number two. I am still excellent at sleeping in places that aren’t my bed. I can sleep on an airplane like a boss. Sometimes I look forward to travel for just that reason.

My children forced me to realize the true value of sleep and made me want to conquer my inability to get any. I try to believe what Annie from
Annie
says, when she reminds us that tomorrow is only a day away. Sleep can completely change your entire outlook on life. One good night’s sleep can help you realize that you shouldn’t break up with someone, or you are being too hard on your friend, or you actually will win the race or the game or get the job. Sleep helps you win at life. So at the ripe old age of forty, I decided to go to a sleep center and see if I could get better at sleep. I was spending a lot of time in Beverly Hills, which is the strangest place in the world. It is also the capital of doctors. If you have never been to a doctor’s office in Beverly Hills, you haven’t lived. Every single waiting room looks like a gorgeous apartment owned by a Persian billionaire. I rolled up to a fancy sleep center at the assigned ten
P.M
. call time. I had spent the entire day not drinking caffeine, as instructed. I am a tea girl. Coffee smells so good but my stomach doesn’t like it. Tea is what my mom and I would drink together in the afternoon, and what Archie and I sometimes sip when we want to have serious talks. I abstained from tea too, yet was still worried about my chances of falling asleep. I knew I was going to be hooked up to wires so they could record my snoring and check me for sleep apnea, and I seriously doubted I would be able to go down. I wondered out loud if anyone had ever stayed up all night. The sweet and gentle technician shook his head no. He asked why I was sent to him and I tilted my head and in a very flirty way said to him, “I am told I snore.”