Regression (Not Fair!)

“It’s not fair!”

Bet you think I’m quoting my toddler, don’t you?  Perhaps she was complaining about not getting a cookie or toy that she wanted?  Nope, that was me.  I actually found myself voicing this lament, using the same inflection that a pouting child would use when they just can’t understand why things aren’t going their way.

As we reach adulthood, most of us learn to accept disappointments, inconveniences, and even losses with a bit more dignity.  We bite our tongues, roll our eyes, and think “oh well.”  We keep quiet in the moment and wait to vent about the problem to a close friend or spouse later that night. 

When an adult isn’t able to find a dignified, reserved way to express their frustrations, they are said to be emotionally immature or stunted.  When someone who previously demonstrated that dignity and reserve only to suddenly lose it, it’s called “regression.”

One day’s worth of sleep deprivation won’t do it.  I’m not too far removed from my late night party days, so I’m no stranger to a night without sleep.  But when you go more than a couple of days in a row with only 2-3 hours of sleep (experienced in the form of 20-30 minute naps) and you look into your future and don’t see any sign of that changing, that’s when regression can set in.

When one is in the middle of one of those nights, there’s a thought that repeats throughout the night in a 5 second loop in one’s brain: “It’s not fair!”  It’s an irrational thought since the newborns causing the situation sure aren’t planning to make the adults’ lives difficult (they wait until they’re toddlers to do that deliberately).  But in that moment, you just want to yell and scream back at the person who’s causing this unfair situation.

How old was I when I stopped saying such things?  “It’s not fair!” is something you say on the playground when another kid gets to go down the slide before you.  It’s something you say when your junior high school teacher makes you stay after school for detention…when the kid who started the trouble skips out unpunished.  But once you’re in college and have a career, you learn to stop voicing that thought aloud.  Yes, there is unfairness in life on a daily basis, but we learn to stomach through it…with some faith that the scales will balance out.

We learn to deal with a 25 minute wait “on hold” when calling customer service.  We learn to wince through the pain when the nurse takes our blood.  We learn to put up with ignorant people at work…or some genius ahead of you on line at the store arguing about an expired 75 cent coupon.  Ultimately, it’s because we know that each of these unpleasant experiences will end eventually, and we’ll be able to just go home, go to sleep, and then start over fresh.

However, there’s no “going home” from this experience.  Especially when nearly every evening follows a pattern of:

·         Tucking the toddler into bed,

·         Joining the wife in bottle-feeding the twins,

·         Re-tucking the toddler into bed…after she has come walking and moaning out of the bedroom for one of us to lie down with her,

·         Playing the pop-the-pacifier-back-in-the-mouth game for the next hour until it’s time to feed again,

·         Managing to finally get onto the computer to check social media, news, messages,

·         Running back into the twins’ room to try to stop one of them from screaming loud enough to wake the other one,

·         Picking up the other one when she does eventually get awakened after 10 minutes of full throated screaming from the first one,

·         Going to sleep,

·         Waking up 45 minutes later in order to have any one of the above-listed items happen again.

It feels like you are pushing that boulder up the hill in hell, and when you lose that sense of reaching a finish line, you start to regress back to childhood.

The reason why children make such a fuss when something happens that they don’t like (or something they would categorize as “not fair”), is that they think that the pain will go on forever.  They haven’t learned to be patient and endure the unpleasantness; it’s a lesson that can only be learned with age and experience.  Of course, an experience of exasperation and exhaustion can eliminate that endurance in any adult.

You’d think it would take a lot to strip away all that composure and finesse that you’ve been developing throughout your adult years.  Turns out, all you need is a few nights without REM sleep.