the importance of being earnest

In the past, I was funnier. I think.

I have to qualify this, and all other statements I'm making these days, because my short term memory is shot and I can't provide an accurate account of anything. I researched this and have discovered I can blame chronic fatigue for this and practically everything else going wrong at the moment. Very convenient.

I'm blaming chronic fatigue for my new earnestness as well. I didn't used to be earnest. In fact, in addition to being funny (I think), I also used to be sarcastic, cynical, witty and smart. Now I'm just earnest, which is a heartbreakingly bland state of existence.

But it's given me a lot of insight into why people are earnest: they're just too damn tired to muster the charming self-deprecatory humor, the basic price of entry into postmodern society, and too exhausted to levy self-righteous indignation or snarky witticisms, the sarcastic insulation necessary for surviving in these god-forsaken times.

No, earnest people don't have the energy for all those clever layers that disguise the banality of life, shielding us from cruel realities and providing illusory havens. Instead, we're rooted, feet firmly planted on the ground, feeling things, and doing our level best to make sure everyone else feels it too.

So my plan is to take a nap every day until I feel sarcastic again.

the common good

Lately, I've been wondering how women from previous centuries did it. How did they convince their infants and toddlers to sleep through the night?

Sleep, along with every other aspect of a child's life, has become a commodity; manuals and aids abound for teaching, cajoling, training or forcing a child to sleep. And yet: to gauge by the free-floating parental angst about children's sleep, fueled by media and marketing (shoot, this may as well be one word: mediarketing), that enveloped me and Mychal well before we became parents as we listened to everyone we knew with children fantasize about a full night's sleep, these market products don't seem to be doing anyone any good.

None of these tools existed in the 19th century; yet sleep deprivation and sleep training, as far as I can tell as someone who has read a lot of women's literature from a lot of cultures, were not all-consuming topics for women (or men) one hundred and fifty years ago.

Before we became parents, we had a tacit agreement that it would not become an all-consuming topic for us either. Except, when you're sleep deprived after six weeks of hellish nights with a pissed off toddler who can and will cry for two, three, four and five hours straight, the idea of sleep becomes an obsession.

I can only speculate, of course. But it seems to me that it has something to do with the notion of "night," as well as the notion of "sleep." In previous centuries, argues A. Roger Ekirch in At Day's Close: night in times past, sleep was split into two periods, the "first sleep" for two to three hours, punctuated by a meal or quiet time and followed by a "second sleep" of about three to four hours. This, save for the middle period which in our case can be anywhere from one to five hours, is exactly how Axel has been sleeping since March 2. Perhaps parents from previous centuries didn't even try to convince or train or force their children to sleep eleven and twelve hour stretches (alone and in the dark).

More likely, though is that women simply nursed their children when they woke crying, no matter how many months past their birth or pounds past their birthweight. For the common good, so that everyone in the house could sleep.