Originally published by The Clifton Courier, August 15, 2018

The other day Mum* said something to me that shook me to my very core.

* Her name is Debra. I hope this information makes the title of this post make more sense. 

I was on the phone, complaining about being tired. I told her that I never seemed to catch up on sleep over the weekend; that I started the working week almost as buggered as when I finished. “I’m just so tired,” I said.

Yes, I complained to a woman who produced four extremely noisy offspring about what being tired was like, as if I was the first person to ever experience fatigue. I’m quite sensitive like that. When I broke my wrist, I cried about the inconvenience of having a portion of a single limb in plaster while on the phone to Mum, a woman who lived through multiple spinal fusions*.

* One of those spinal fusions was after I was born too, as fate would have it. I mean, I did apologise to her for my role in that surgery via a hand-made Mother’s Day card a few years back, but I suppose you could say that the scars still remain…

Anyway, there I was banging on about how sleep was like laundry – I just never seem to be on top of it.

“You’re never going to catch up on sleep,” Mum said with the same offhanded cheeriness she had when she casually informed me that everyone was going to die.

Now, I’ll get back to being tired shortly, but I feel like I need to provide some context to Mum telling me every living creature on the planet was doomed.

It wasn’t as if she was telling me where babies came from and decided she may as well continue on, covering the human life cycle from infancy to greasy teen to stressed adult to grumpy grandparent to the grave. She didn’t drop the bomb while I was learning my ABCs.

No, it was because I’d prompted her.

I suppose I caught her off-guard. I mean, you can’t really prepare for the kind of questions kids come up with. And I doubt my behaviour indicated I was grappling with the profound mysteries of the universe.

I recall being about four years old at that time – it was a magical period when my older sisters were off at school/preschool and my younger sister wasn’t really a thing yet.  I had free reign on the house and, apparently, plenty of time to think deep, disturbing thoughts. On this particular day I was preparing myself for a busy morning of reading Disney stories aloud with a cassette tape while feeling like an absolute queen lounging on my parents’ double bed.

But before I could re-read Aladdin for the hundredth time, I asked Mum to clarify something about the end of the world. I can’t say for sure what made me aware of the concept of my own mortality, but I do hope to find out through expensive hypo-therapy sessions one day when I’ve made it big.

I remember standing at my parent’s bedroom door as Mum’s merry affirmation that “everybody dies” hit me like a medicine ball to the guts*.

* And not the clean medicine balls you see at the gym. I’m talking about the heavy, leathery suckers covered in dust and cobwebs in the primary school sports shed. 

I believe that was my very first existential crisis. But because I was so small, my body could only be filled with so much dread. Plus, I was living in a golden age of Sesame Street and primo educational television*, so I had plenty to distract me from my impending doom.

* More than Words was my fave, but there were so many crackers on the air. I really have to thank the executives at the ABC for helping to form my brain. I owe them so much. 

And the words of my mother were useful, really driving home the message about why I shouldn’t eat poison or play in traffic – because you don’t get spare lives like a Nintendo game. I mean, I’m still here today, so I guess that reality-crushing revelation did me some good.

So while Mum telling me that catching up on sleep was essentially impossible was another hit to the guts, I realise it was one I had to have.

I realise now that I can’t go living my life from weekend to weekend thinking I can claw back lost shut-eye. It’s not like catching up on The Real Housewives of New Jersey. I can’t just binge on sleep on Saturday and expect to start off the week all caught up on Monday morning. Life doesn’t work that way, I guess.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’ve decided to live life in accordance with a new motto, derived from Mum’s recent truth bomb and the first, childhood-shattering revelation: life’s short, get some bloody sleep.

Goodnight.*

* When it appeared in The Clifton Courier, the story featured an editor’s note pointing out the irony that I’d sent in that particular column to the paper at 11.52pm, given the subject matter. Mum loved it.