Visiting daughter

When I was in college, I loved coming home to my parents’ house at the end of each term. Along with the delicious food that my mother and grandmother cooked for me, what I really looked forward to was, sleeping in late. There were no lectures to attend, no notes to make, no visits to the library and no worry about going to bed hungry if I missed hearing the ding-dong of the dinner gong.

My mom would occasionally check on my breathing to make sure I was okay. She wanted to wake me up at the crack of dawn but my father urged her to let me sleep for as long as I wanted to.

“People take sleeping pills to get the kind of slumber that comes naturally to her,” my dad would announce to no one in particular. 

“Let her rest,” he reiterated, if anyone tried to awaken me. Nobody did. And so I slept to my heart’s content. 

This arrangement continued even after I got married and became a mum myself. The minute I reached my parents’ place, I handed the baby to them and went to sleep. And sometimes I slept a round-the-clock. Knowing that they would be looking after my kid better than I could, gave me the mental assurance to do that. I simply relished those hours of pure repose.

Soon, I was forced to grow up. My precious parents left for their heavenly abode and I was obliged to shoulder my own responsibilities. As our daughter became older, my sleeping pattern got erratic. My one ear and eye were forever tuned towards her and if she fell ill, I completely lost sleep altogether.

A few years later we were faced with an empty nest as she went away to pursue her university studies. This should have given me the freedom to go back to my original sleeping order but what actually happened was that I began disrupting my husband’s sleep. 

Any little worry I had would make me shake him to wakefulness. To watch him sleeping soundly while I was dying with anxiety irritated the hell out of me. Waking from deep sleep because of my real or imagined concerns annoyed him to no end too. We bickered and squabbled before eventually going back to a fitful sleep.

But I realised that the wheel had turned a full circle when our daughter came home for vacations. The child could not stop sleeping! Eight hours, ten hours, and fourteen hours at a stretch: whenever I peeped into her room, the dark haired head was always under the covers, with eyes tightly shut. I must confess that there were intervals when I discretely checked her exhalation to make sure everything was fine.

Once she started working, she had to live by the dictates of the alarm clock. It forced some unwelcome discipline into her life. But there was not the slightest change in her sleeping habits whenever she visited us.

After she missed having breakfast with us for the fifth time on her recent trip my spouse got worried. 

“Did she go to a party last night?” he asked me. 

“She had dinner with us,” I reminded him.

“Why is she sleeping so late?” he questioned. 

“People take tablets to get that kind of slumber,” I said.

“She’s on sleeping pills?” my husband was aghast.

“It’s called home leave syndrome,” I diagnosed.

“In other words, sleep of the innocent,” he agreed.