But first, sleep. Lucy and Ricky were onto something.

After 20 years of terrible dysfunctional sleep, I may have broken the spell.

Years ago, when I first blogged about my struggles with chronic insomnia, a man left a comment speculating on how miserable my family must be to have to deal with a sleep-deprived, overly exhausted, and most certainly short-tempered and irritable human in the house.

Ouch.
Okay.

Maybe there was a tiny grain of truth there, but on a blog that was read by an overwhelming majority of women, you could guess how this rare comment from a man went over. Not well.

I may or may not have entered perimenopause at that point. I don’t remember. I was in my early 40s, so I think my propensity for sleeplessness was more self-inflicted, or at least situational, than hormonal at the time. Just as I found it fascinating that babies need to be taught how to fall asleep, I shouldn’t be surprised to learn how difficult it is to rewire our internal clocks after years of disrupted sleep habits. I just knew that what I was calling “sleep” since I became a mother was nothing short of a perfunctory act to get me through the next 18 hours of wakefulness.