You’re not really exhausted until the hallucinations start: Droplets of mercury floated in my peripheral vision. A lemon levitated out of the fruit bowl. A streetlight at the corner of State and Garfield laid its long body down on the sidewalk. The cat looked up at me from the corner of my desk, twitched his muzzle, and said, “Libby, Libby, Libby.”
I experienced all these visions sometime during my son Henry’s first several months of life, after I’d gone back to work at the Wisconsin university where I teach English. The exact chronology escapes me. Tired people do not form accurate memories, and my personal journal from that time is sketchy and full of brief exclamations over my baby boy’s cuteness and developmental milestones. What remain in my mind are scattered recollections, like curled strips of celluloid on a cutting-room floor, trimmed from a movie about a woman in her midthirties who worked at a demanding job, who had a new husband and an even newer baby, and who was extravagantly tired.
