I remember the exact moment I read a passage about sleep in A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk’s beloved and divisive motherhood memoir. I was lying in bed on my side. The baby wasn’t sleeping very much and so I wasn’t sleeping very much, and my mind was starting to unravel. Everyone told me to feed the baby on demand and to never let her cry; no one mentioned the impact sleep deprivation would have on me.
“Sleep, like a great bear, a soft warm vigilant guardian of unconsciousness, had rolled away with a yawn and padded off elsewhere never, it seems, to return,” Cusk wrote. Yes, I thought. Yes. I miss that great bear. That warm, dark nothing. At the time, even when I was asleep, I was alert, matchsticks of hyper-vigilance keeping my eyes open and brain awake. It was such a genius image, like the bear on the final page of Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, padding off gently down the beach. I could hear the footsteps. I could touch the soft fur through the letters. I remembered the blanket comfort of sleep. The line made me feel normal and human and that my own experience of sleep and sleep deprivation was important when everything around me seemed to be saying the opposite.
