2/11/2022 1 Comment Watching the NightI’m sitting on the yellow seat in my craft room. It’s not the comfiest, with my laptop on my knee and my back curves around my enlarged belly, all of me curving and thinking longingly of being horizontal in bed. It’s almost 2am. The harvest moon was full two days ago, and its still bright. Occasionally shrouded by cloud, still the silhouette of the hills stands out against the deep petrol sky. I yawn wide enough to catch flies, eyes watering and knowing it’s entirely hideous. But there’s no one else awake and so what does it matter what my yawns look like?
I sit here because sleep won’t come. Every time I shut my eyes, I feel sleep approaching and then my brain awakens and brings up a long-forgotten anxiety. Silly things. There’s no real anxiety, it’s just my brain playing tricksy buggers. And I fidget and move and know that the more I try the less likely sleep is. And so instead I get up, reach for my dressing gown and change rooms, change positions. Now, I wonder when sleep will come for me. I am helpless in the wish for it. Inside me the baby sleeps, but it’s already had hiccups and done some good rearranging: getting comfy in an evermore constricted place. Soon it won’t be my own sleeplessness keeping me awake. Soon it will be this wee baby’s need for its mum that leaves my nights disturbed. And it makes me think of the other animals in my world that know this. I think of the fox with a womb full of wriggling cubs, and later, them lined up in front of her. I picture her like I’ve seen dogs with their own litters. Eyes closed in contentment, stretched out, occasionally jerking as one niggles too hard. And the fox in her leaf-lined den seems ever closer. At our roots we are mammal. Every female mammal in the world experiences what I am now experiencing. The movement within. The jabbing feet, the encircling protection, the awaiting change. I yearn for the baby to be in my arms, but at the same time feel content knowing that they’re there, waiting and comfortable. Warm and cosy. I feel everything all at once. Impatient with my changing abilities, but patient enough to want to nest. I long to be surrounded by wool and cloth, making warmth for my baby. The night hills have become so familiar to me during this pregnancy. I can sleep walk to the toilet, climbing back into bed and be asleep again within seconds, but also every so often I have one of these fidgety nights where I sit up later than I wish, thinking thoughts, dreaming and willing my frustrations to calm so that maybe, just maybe, sleep will return. I think of everything I could be doing: I could go downstairs and knit. I could think again about what baby outfits to pack in our hospital bag. I could, I could, I could. But I don’t. Because I just long for sleep and to move from this location is to admit that I am awake. So instead, I sit here and write and watch the silver tinted clouds scuttle in front of the fading harvest moon and I think to myself: next time there’s a full moon, will I watch this same scene, but with my baby in my arms? As the fox sleeps in her den under the hill.
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