Can a person die of sleep deprivation?

This morning I woke up completely exhausted. My mind and body ached as though I had just run a marathon. But it was no marathon that had me utterly beat…it was my infant. Up again, down again, up again, down again…that was the pattern for the night. At 5:30 this morning I gave up entirely on getting any amount sleep that was worth anything, got out of bed, changed a diaper, and started bouncing my son in his bouncy seat.

As I lay there blinking my eyes to keep them open I began to wonder, “is my mind wasting away as I sit here and have conversations with a little person who absolutely has no vocabulary beyond ooh and aah?” But each and every time I see him smile or see a pouty lip, I know that it doesn’t matter that I’m not talking politics or reading novels, our conversations are just as important as whatever CNN has to say. Our conversations are full of meaning and knowledge–I mean it. I see him trying to learn words, I see him communicating with me and it’s awesome.

Sometimes it’s true, some evenings my conversations with my husband go like this, “How was your day?” “Fine,” I reply. “What did you do?” “Well, I was pooped on, spit up on, pooped on again…” It is in those moments that I realize that I have had more to do with fecal matter and saliva than any person would like and it’s all I can talk about because the stack of messy diapers in the diaper genie are all I have to show for my day. Sometimes in those moments I want to scream and run away and not look back. But then my husband picks up our son and I hear my son laugh, so I turn around and I see his smile. What a smile. It lights up my whole world and in that moment I would change every single diaper all over again.

I don’t worry that this is anything but normal. I read in a parenting magazine that “to be passionate is to momentarily fantasize about throwing it all away.” I know that I don’t want to walk away, there is too much to leave behind and nothing to walk towards. Everything that I have ever wanted, needed, or desired is staring me in the face, wanting me to talk to him, to feed him, to hold him, to change those dang poopy diapers. And it’s all worth it. End of story.

But if the aforementioned quote is true, then I at 5:30 this morning I was very very passionate.