Neighborly Exhaustion

So the 5:30am Guy moved out. After we talked about the morning noise issue, he was great. Sure, I still heard the occasional drawer opening in his kitchen or the spoon in the cereal bowl, but I was definitely spared the responsibility of being Keeper of the Morning Phone Call Secrets. He moved out early though, a few months before the end of his lease. I knew he was only staying short-term, but I do wonder if tiptoeing around in the mornings wore him down. Still, he was awesome and he really understood and tried and if he ever happens to read this, I want to thank him. For someone with DSPS, understanding neighbors are worth their weight in gold.

Which brings me to the new family upstairs…

A woman. What appears to be her mother. And the kicker? A four year old boy who has obviously never lived above someone else’s head before. Let’s call him Superman. The first time I heard him was through my living room ceiling. I was sitting on the couch having my morning coffee and checking my e-mail around 11:00am one morning and BOOM!!!! Holy shit. Another one follows – BOOM!!!! Are we having another earthquake?? Then an even louder one – BOOM!!!!!!!!!!!! What the hell???

Then I hear an adult male laughing, saying something about flying. Not long after that, I hear “flying” down the stairs just outside my apartment door in the foyer. It sounds like two people are jumping down the stairs – a big person and a little person. This, I assume, is Daddy. The missing Daddy, it turns out. But I digress. They emerge from the building and appear in full glory in front of my windows. It suddenly becomes clear to me. The mystery of flight is explained by the fact that the kid is wearing a Superman cape. Ah ha. Flying. Crash landing into my ceiling, apparently. Considerate of others, aren’t they?

Over the next several days, my hopes that Superman stays down to earth when he’s not playing with Daddy are shattered. Now, the family who moved out had kids too. I’m NOT – repeat, NOT – complaining about having a child living upstairs. That family had a three year old and a baby, and although I was looking forward to not having the toy that played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” living above my reading nook any longer, they were wonderful. Kid noises are kid noises, and the Star Family rarely woke me up. When they did, I assumed it was a holiday, or the kids were sick, or any number of things that might happen to cause playing or crying or something loud in the morning. Those things are part of life, they happen once in a while and I learned to live with them just like I assume they learned to live with my occasional Girl Get-Togethers that ran until the early hours of the morning.

So my first reaction to Superman was that he was adjusting to a new place, and to whatever circumstances led to the change. The first few days, the poor kid woke up screaming like Stephen King’s It was the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes. I felt bad for him, and I am truly glad that those morning terrors seem to have stopped. But adjustment doesn’t seem to be the problem.

You see, the adults are louder than Superman. He wakes up and yells for his mother or grandmother…and she yells back. (How do you think I know their relationships? It’s how I know mom and son’s names too. They haven’t introduced themselves. Grandma doesn’t seem to have a name. She’s been reduced to a social role now.) They stand outside, right in front of my bedroom window, and yell to the other people who remain in the apartment upstairs. They watch as Superman stomps his way up and down the stairs – both the ones in the foyer just outside my living room door and the wooden stairs in the back next to my bedroom. Those are the ones they use in the morning. They stash his bikes and toys under those stairs and let him play with them bright and early, riding up and down along the narrow two foot walkway that runs – you guessed it – right below my bedroom windows.

The pattern is the same. He doesn’t wake up too awfully early for someone without DSPS, but for me? It’s just enough to really mess me up for the day. Around 8:00am I hear the wake up call to mom. For the next hour, it’s a noise-fest. They usually leave just after 9:00, and sometimes I can fall back asleep. Sometimes I can’t, especially on work days. I’ve been hoping it was temporary, but it seems clear at this point that the adults aren’t even aware it’s a problem. He’s not going to learn to respect the neighbors if they aren’t teaching him how to do that. In fact, they’re modeling the exact opposite.

This morning - at exactly 8:08am - he was in front of my windows with grandma who was yelling at him to “Look! Look!” at something. It took a Herculean effort, but I’d had enough. They obviously weren’t planning to introduce themselves anytime soon so that I could politely explain the situation to them, like I did with 5:30am Guy. I raised the blinds, hoisted open the window and mumbled, “It’s early, people are still sleeping.” Grandma lowered her voice a bit and said, “Oh, right. Okay.” Then as she turned to take Superman back upstairs, I heard her mutter under her breath…

“What did you do, stay up until 2:00am?”

Oh, she did NOT just say that. Fightin’ words. If it hadn’t been 8:00 in the morning, they would be fighting words anyway. Honestly? At that time of day, you can say just about anything to me and the most I’ll do is tell you to shut up and get out of my face so I can go back to sleep.

What I wanted to tell her was that yes, I did stay up until 2:00am. 2:15, actually. I was reading and re-reading interviews I’d done with cancer patients, trying to make sense out of their pain, and trying to understand the emotional pain of planning their own deaths to make it easier for the people they love. I was trying to do that without falling apart emotionally myself, as I saw them crying in my head again and again. Yes. I was up until 2:00am. I wanted to ask her what she was doing at 2:00am? Just sleeping??? How unproductive!!

But I could only say that in my head. The effort to shut the window, roll back over and try to get a little bit more sleep was the most energy I could muster. For today, anyway.