  P was dreaming about something and, in the great silence of 3:42 in the morning, let out a single,&nbsp;bloodcurdling scream. She settled in a moment. She never woke up. This happens sometimes. The effect it has on me is like a gallon of adrenaline ice-picking it way through my veins at a thousand miles an hour.
So she drifts back off peacefully while I lie there, with vomit at the base of my throat, heart pounding, hands shaking, guts roiling around like wet leaves in a drain. It's true what they say when you're a mother that you never get a full night's sleep again. It starts when you're pregnant -- the baby doing flip-flop hiccups at two fifteen, then you're up, watching the Weather Channel and doing a crossword puzzle while eating Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch.
Later on in pregnancy, you're just sleeping on the toilet because your bladder has a 5 cc capacity. Luckily in the first anonymous rowhouse we lived in, the sink console provided an adequate pillow. And, of course, for however long you nurse and the baby needs them,&nbsp;you are at least semi-awake doing the overnight feedings. I never saw dawn infiltrate the night so many times since I became a mother. When P was about five weeks S and I were entirely run off our feet.
She was very colicky -- understatement of the year -- and keeping us both running, all day, all the time. He was still working, of course. He could only take a few days off, and he took them right around her birth. S got himself really sick -- he got an infection&nbsp;and no one knew what it was. He would swing a fever hard every night, from 105, shivered down to 97.
He was in the back room sweating through the sheets. I was in the front room with the baby. All night -- feeding, putting her down, going and looking in on my semi-comatose man, back to the baby. I figured out the the cause of the infection myself and got him treated and he got better. But that was a few days when I saw more hours of the night, fraught with more ice in my veins, than I care to remember.
It's early here at the anonymous rowhouse and the Philly summer sun is hanging askew in the haze, like a half-deflated balloon. I'm girding myself for the morning of Getting Ready for Preschool and wishing to God I had gotten some decent sleep last night. It's not always possible when you're looking out always for the ones you love most. 
