Luxurious sleep

Warning:  Biffle's been talking about politics and ideologies and serious matters.  I'm talking just about myself, so this is a change of pace for the blog.  Now you've been prepared.

I’m here in Fairfax, VA, at a conference.  Last night I had downtime in my room.  I had some room service food for dinner, talked to Walter, read a bit, and then at 9:20 decided I was tired enough to go to sleep.  It’s 6:10, and I just got up.

At home these days I sleep so fitfully.  I almost always wake up at 3, and often it takes me an hour to get back to sleep.  I woke up multiple times in the night last night, but I always fell right back to sleep.  Twice in the night I woke up because I heard Maybelle make a noise—and then immediately knew that that wasn’t the case, and fell back to sleep.

So why is this?  This experience suggests that my poor sleep isn’t simply a biochemical thing.  Obviously it’s, in part, my sense of responsibility for Maybelle.  Here I’m in a hotel where I’m responsible for nothing but myself.  There are no dogs or cats wandering around the house, asking to be let out or in in the night.  There was nobody else in the bed with me.  Is this what I need for good sleep—freedom from all responsibility?

Another interesting thing is that I’m presenting at the conference today.  That fact apparently isn’t causing me any anxiety, because thinking of that didn’t shoot my body full of adrenaline and wake me up in the night.

I don’t know.  I enjoyed it, and I think I needed the sleep.  But I’d really like to be a person who sleeps well at home.  I used to be that person, and I’d like to be that person again.

Why we've disappeared

I'm sorry not to have been around since the excitement of a couple of weeks ago. Let me just say that in recent days we've had a death in the family, and we've been traveling, for many days in a spot with no internet access. It's also the middle of the semester, which means that work is busy, and I've been experimenting with some psychotherapeutic stuff that I may talk about here at some point down the road.

So I haven't been blogging, and I haven't been reading other people's blogs. But those are temporary things--I'll be back soon.

For now, here's a picture of Biffle and Maybelle enjoying one of the most beautiful spots in Nashville, Radnor Lake:

OMG go read Motherlode

I have an article up at Motherlode, the parenting blog for the NYTimes.  I sort of can't believe this.

Please go over and have a look, and let me know what you think.  The article relates to the book project I'm working on, a feminist disability studies approach to prenatal testing and parenting children with Down syndrome.  The editor has alerted me to the fact that the comments section will probably be very interesting.  I want to know what Readers in the World think, but I also really want to know what Baxter Sez readers think.

Oh, and I hate to make Girl w/Pen such an afterthought, but I have a piece up over there today, too, so have a look at it, too!

Okay, and a final thought:  if readers from Motherlode come over here looking for more, you might start here, where I've assembled a list of past posts about Maybelle and Down syndrome.  Or, you know, just scroll around.  We talk about Maybelle all the time.  And politics, too.