I’m suffering from lockdown fatigue – and I can’t sleep at night

When her dad suggests she take a sleeping pill for insomnia and a yummy mummy invites her for a laser face peel with a sedative thrown in, Charlotte Cripps realises not everybody understands addiction

(Amara May)

Lockdown No 2 has ruled out endless shopping trips. My bank balance is happier as long as I stay away from Amazon Prime but I’ve got cabin fever. Obviously, my mental state is nowhere near as unhinged as Jack Torrance in The Shining,  who tries to murder his family after a long period of isolation in a hotel, but alarm bells are ringing nevertheless. 

Like a lot of people I’m suffering from lockdown fatigue – I’m sick of being cautious.  Almost doing nothing is more exhausting than being out and about. I just can’t get a good night’s sleep. I’m tossing and turning and spending half the night scrolling through Instagram and checking the headlines. 

It doesn’t help that I share a bed with Lola and Liberty. Even though I forked out for a super king at great expense, they still manage to push me out so I’m hanging on to the corner for dear life. 

I have to admit I haven’t tried a hot bath and candles or meditation but when my dad says to me: “Why don’t you take a sleeping pill?” I’m taken aback. Is he totally mad? Has he learned nothing? 

“Dad?” I say. “I’ve been abstinent from drink and drugs for 21 years?” Hello? Only the week before a yummy mummy friend suggested we go for a new face peel laser treatment where you get given Xanax for the pain relief.  

Don’t they get it?  My dad certainly can’t have forgotten the horror show of my addiction, that’s for sure, but it shows that despite having gone to Al-Anon for families of alcoholics, he still doesn’t fully understand the illness – like so many others. 

I can’t just pop a valium when I feel like it. Even the 12-step slogan “one is too many and a thousand is never enough” is underplaying it. I’ve been trained to fast forward the tape – a relapse is not a pretty sight. 

But just as I’m pondering my dad’s comments about drugging myself, before I know it, I’m transported back in time to our family home’s beige bathroom just off the Upper Richmond Road West. I'm approaching my teens. It’s where my dad still lives – now alone – but back then it was jam-packed with me and my four older half-siblings and my mum. 

It’s another era. My dad’s stash of sleeping pills in the bathroom cupboard seems no more potent than the Haliborange vitamin tablets on the shelf above. They are part of a first aid box rather than a dangerous, addictive drug. Mother’s Little Helper wasn’t what it is today; Lola helping me unpack the food shopping. No, it was a help-yourself tablet on a bad day.

My parents had a more laissez-faire attitude to drink and drugs in those days. For them, any night was dinner-party night. Booze was free-flowing:  “Are you a man or a mouse” my dad challenged my brother Ant before he threw up. Nibbles – including cheese sticks and olives – were laid out for my parents' friends like we were on a loop of Abigail’s Party.  

My dad, who had lived in Madrid for a long time during the 1960s, where three of my siblings were born from his first marriage, still smoked Gauloise cigarettes so the place stank. As a young child, we would all be packed into his Jaguar with the windows closed in cold weather while he chain-smoked. Putting children in car seats that cost £400 was not part of any plan.  We were packed in like sardines on each other’s laps. Conversations with other mums about the safety of buying second-hand vomit-stained car seats didn’t happen. You simply didn't bother with them.

Luckily, I wasn’t born pre-1967 drink driving laws, when my mum and dad shared the driving in their old Austin car, being sick out of the windows and taking it in turns to see straight on their way home. But still years later at my parent’s dinner parties, their guests turned a blind eye to drink-driving. Whoever was least hammered drove home. The catchphrase was: “It’s only five minutes away!”

It was a laugh a minute at our house for visitors but often the dynamics of a large and complicated family took its toll on us on. Just getting past each other on the stairs felt like crossing Piccadilly Circus pre-lockdown. 

As my parents entertained, I would be upstairs watching Top of the Pops with my older sister Rebecca in her bedroom as she smoked dope and we sprayed the room with deodorant. 

When my mum brought in the lamb casserole and they had moved on from sherry and prosecco to red wine to liquors, the laughter was intoxicating downstairs. You would never know the next morning there had been a party – the crime scene was spotlessly clean.  How different my children's home life is. I take a couple of online 12-step meetings each week, washed down with a cup of herbal tea. When I take Lola and Liberty to my dad's, little do they know the history of the place. 

It’s the same bathroom at my dad’s house, where I would shut myself away in the depths of my addiction when I popped over for supper. 

Addiction can be genetic: my greatest wish for them is that they haven’t inherited the gene. Or even if they have, I can help break the cycle by being in recovery. In the meantime, when we visit my dad and they go into the bathroom, I find myself watching them, irrationally, like a hawk.