Eating and Sleeping

In the end, it all boils down to eating and sleeping. Too much of one and not enough of the other. Insomnia is an old friend, the kind that undermines you and talks about you behind your back. Overeating is a newer acquaintance, associated in my mind with aging, with spreading horizontally while shrinking vertically. My mother, who hardly ever slept and began each day by announcing that she had had “a bad night,” was also attached to the memory of being 96 pounds when she married my father in 1930. This may or may not be true, but she saved her wedding gown, altering it for use as a party dress, and I wore it as a costume when I was a tiny slip of a six year old. 

All through my childhood, people were trying to get me to eat. My father once offered me $5, a lavish sum in those days, to finish my dinner. When all else failed, they would take me out for Chinese food which I was known to eat in astonishing quantities. They don’t make greasy, salty lo mein the way they used to. But nor do I need egg rolls to stay alive any longer. My repertoire has expanded to scones and shortbread, bucatini and baklava. Flour whispers to me in its many love languages.

Photo by ABHISHEK HAJARE on Unsplash

I turn to my mother who died in 2006 to serve as a role model and note that around the age of eighty, vanity notwithstanding, she began to blow up into a large, cushiony version of her previous self. This was around the time she moved alone into a senior living “community” where she comforted herself with Hershey bars. I’m still living in my own home with my own husband, so the eating doesn’t seem to be a result of melancholy. It’s something my body wants to do whether I’m having a good day after a bad night or a bad day after a good night. A certain amount of shame accompanies both overeating and insomnia. I’m ashamed of my weakness and I’m sometimes ashamed of my appearance. If I don’t sleep, I look like a distant cousin in the Addams family lineage.

Eating and sleeping proceed from opposite premises. Eating is about meeting up with the world and grabbing at it, incorporating great chunks of it into oneself. Wanting, craving. Sleeping is about withdrawal from the world, self-emptying. I cannot sleep when the world is too much with me, like after an episode of “The Bear.” I’m aware that overstimulation of any kind, visual, chemical, or interpersonal, keeps me from descending into that river of forgetting that I need to wallow in every day. It’s not the specific content that matters. It’s something in the brain waves. If the vibration is too rapid, sleep will refuse to visit. But because I have a longer relationship with insomnia, I know its tricks and can outmaneuver it some of the time. With food, I’m in somewhat over my head. I’ve tried telling myself that it’s ok to be hungry, but it’s a tough sell. The stomach wants what the stomach wants. 

My most effective strategy for eating less and sleeping more is meandering. Meandering is walking meditation’s poor relation. When Frank and I used to walk on Main Street in Stockbridge, he would invariably lose patience with my pace because I stopped to look at every geranium, every window shimmering with 18th century glass. I have discovered that walking, not running, but meandering, alleviates both the desire for food and the overcharged interior noise that keeps me awake.  Today, we strolled at the Rose Garden near Lake Harriet, up and down the plantings of red, yellow, pink and coral bushes. I was concerned that the middle of July might be too late for the roses in this hot, dry summer. But there they were waiting for me, seeming to welcome my attention even though it probably means nothing to their wellbeing. It means nothing to their flowering, their scent. They don’t exist for me like a bag of potato chips, the return of greasy, salty. They don’t ask for my opinion like paintings in a museum. My field of vision softens when I look at them and that’s it, that’s all that happens.

Flowers don’t overeat or lie awake at night worrying and regretting, regretting and worrying. If the sun and rain show up on time, the roses will flourish and the people in the garden will leave under their spell. Life will go on as it did for my mother for close to twenty years after she moved to senior living in California until one day she began to fail and lose her taste for chocolate bars. After that, she shriveled to almost nothing and slept all day, beyond vanity and beyond worry and regret. 

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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