SLEEPLESS GRATITUDE, by S.R. Conroy

Mumma/Author/Illustrator FOREWORD.  Revised June 23rd 2023. 

Sleepless night, check. 

Over-caffeinated check, check. 

Ticking several life goals already today, in hindsight. Firstly, can we really go beyond the complete success of merely showing up at my adult job earlier today, surrounded by actual physical humans and physical animals, without the unfortunate contribution of indistinguishable matter, along a gradient somewhere between a glob of melted cheese toasty or perhaps two-year-old nasal secretions, immersing itself into that one, and I mean one, birds’ nest that i think still resembles my ponytail and  just will not give up?!!!. 

Second success.  The School Run.  Executed with such precision and accomplished without the concept of the existence of a pack of rabid velociraptors stalking the house perimeter at home and hunting us pack style into the safety of the school gate. 

Thirdly, a laundry epiphany presents itself in the post work flurry, where everyone decides it’s just easier to eat pasta and cheese again for the third night in a row, rather than work out what size broccoli we all actually want to eat or to try and reason with the littlest that no “sauce” is not technically a meal when it’s by itself.  THE LAUNDRY EPIPHANY…”Everyone,” I suggest, “I have a very clear system in place currently regarding the washing situation.  Going forward, I suggest you sniff everything. Anything that smells dirty probably is dirty, or terribly dirty. And the stuff that doesn’t smell dirty…may or may not be.”

Silence. From said, “Everyone.”

Yes, I reassure myself, just as I thought, we are all on the same page of efficiency.  

And once everyone is finally settled, the quietness comes.  The night lights hum. And that moment just before everyone went to sleep, when you thought you could not keep your eyes open any more, vanishes.  It is here in this sleepless, chaotic, ever running towards something/someone life, that we have right now, where gratitude descends. Gratitude for the laundry, and the boogers in the hair and the school runs with dinosaurs. 

Knowing that 20 years from now this will have been the briefest of time in life. 

Which is where the urgency to write all of the stories down and to bring all the little characters that might spark, if only the briefest and never to be repeated smiles to those little persons’ faces, becomes important, becomes necessary. 

There is a place somewhere after midnight, but before the pre-dawn, marched steadily into existence only on the beat of breaths of little adventurers sleeping soundly (albeit for the briefest of time before they wake again), where the quiet comes in the day enough to feel…some of the greatest imagined adventures come to life.

I know a story about a Polar Bear… I can tell it to you…I can show you…