When life feels graceless

Operating on four hours of sleep

We’re officially in another sleep regression. This time my daughter is refusing to sleep anywhere else but in bed with me. No matter when I get her down, she’s back at my bedside after a couple hours.

I’ve never been a great sleeper. My mom likes to joke that between my sister and I, she didn’t sleep through the night for ten years.

I used to laugh at this, now I’m horrified.

I’ve struggled on and off with insomnia my whole life. When my daughter was younger and we were officially co-sleeping, I could never drop my hyper-vigilance. I was endlessly waking up to make sure she was breathing. It got better when she got older, but I still woke up with every toss, turn or arm flail. And so it was a relief when she transitioned, happily, into her own bed.

That seems to have come to an abrupt end.

We’ve had times since the transition, of course, when she’d creep back in. Like anytime she was under the weather. But for the last three weeks she hasn’t spent a single full night in her own bed. With trying, and failing, to resettle her I was averaging four hours of sleep a night, and was ready to unravel.

So I’ve done the only thing I can do…accept it.

There’s an old Daoist saying: acceptance leads to gratitude, and gratitude leads to grace.

We’re all trained to struggle against what is—the isness of our bodies, our lives, the state of our homes, the intensity of the seasons we move through. But this wisdom reminds me that, when I can just surrender, accepting what’s ultimately out of my control, I find a way in my heart to be grateful.

Maybe grateful that, despite operating on four hours of sleep, I have the flexibility in my life to take it easier that day, like ordering takeout for dinner. Or grateful for the fact that we have beds at all. That they are warm and cozy and my child is safe inside them. Or grateful that I have other mama friends to talk to about it. Friends who’ll say, “I feel you,” “this is so hard,” or “it’ll get better.”

And when we can find this gratitude, for even the smallest things in our existence, it naturally leads us to the place we’ve been striving to get to all along—grace.

As the mom of a toddler, I feel graceless a lot of the time. My hair is pretty much always sticking out at odd angles. I have random outbursts of stress crying and frustration at any hour of the day. My clothes are pretty much always unwashed, rumpled, or in a heap on the floor.

If I let it, it can feel like my entire life these days is just one long graceless stretch of lines under my eyes, dust bunnies beneath the furniture, and a half-deflated kiddie pool on the porch that I haven’t had the time or inclination to replace.

But I’ve noticed… the moment I stop trying to making everything different than it is, the moment I simply accept that I’m exhausted, that this phase of life is hard, that I too overwhelmed to make a good decision right now… things get easier.

When I see the dust bunny on the floor and can laugh at its tumble-weed resemblance in the true Wild Wild West of raising a toddler…

When I look in the mirror at the aura of unkempt hair and can re-envision it as a saintly halo…

When I simply accept that I won’t be buying a new kiddie pool this summer, that it feels unnecessary and depleting…

Then I can find the gratitude that’s always there beneath the surface.

And when I can touch that, grace streams in.

It’s unexpected, grace. It never feels warranted.

But I guess that’s the definition of grace. Grace isn’t something you work for. It’s something that’s given to you, a gift that rocks you with it’s specific, life-deepening kindness.

I’m always yearning for more grace in my life. To have things flow more easily, for my days to be infused with the goodwill of the unseen, to move more elegantly through the waters of existence.

And in those moments when things feel distinctly graceless—when I’m so exhausted I’m floating outside of my body or the panic pinches at my heart after I’m woken up again in the night and can’t go back to sleep—I try to come back to this:

Instead of fighting…how can I accept it?

Because acceptance is how gratitude takes root. And out of gratitude, grace—that force that can change life in an instant, bestowing pardon, restoring order, showing us the higher design behind it all—can stream in.

Last night, lying in bed awake at 2 am, with the silk of my daughter’s head nestled against my cheek, moving slightly with every breath, I felt it.

I felt the full surrender of life. The unexpected gratitude of this fleeting, tender moment. The sense that even in my most graceless states, the goodwill of the universe is endless.

And that grace—this force that brings light, brings morning, brings hope—is here, even in the middle of a long, long night.

P.S. I write all this, and I also want to make it known (just in case some unseen power is listening) that, even among the acceptance, I’d still love to sleep through the night again. Ok, noted? Thanks!