Nicky de Jager

Hi. I’m a single mom of a six-year-old daughter. Yes, that’s us in my header picture. Swimming in the river in my favourite place on the planet: Morgan Bay, Eastern Cape, South Africa. I’m a late bloomer (had Jasmine when I was 41), which makes me 48. It always feels like I must be talking about someone else when I see that, 48, that is, because that can’t possibly be me. I don’t feel any age at all, I just feel like me.

I am from Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, where I work as a sub-editor. I love words, especially sparkly words, like “gruntle” which as you might guess means the opposite of “disgruntle”, i.e. it means “pleased or satisfied”. Dinkum, you can check the Oxford Dictionary.

Apart from sparkly words and my delightful daughter Jasmine, nature and the wee hours of the morning make me feel truly alive. A psychologist once said of Jasmine: “She comes off a different production line.” (As do all Asperger’s kids)

I don’t remember a time when I had a normal relationship with sleep. I once read a quirky book about a hostage situation. One of the hostages was a strange silent fellow for whom “sleep was like foreign land to which he could not obtain a visa”. Can’t remember the author or the title, but I’ve never forgotten that.

In my late teens I developed the probably slightly unhealthy habit of pulling all-nighters, just for the buzz of feeling night change to day. I called it being on dawn patrol, keeping vigil for that special split-second of shifting energies. If I was sharing it with anyone, we’d always look at each other at the same instant, smile and know: ”That was it.”

Maybe that was when my Insomnimom-ness was born. I’m sure it has more than a bit to do with it, at any rate. Whatever the reason, I have a special relationship with insomnia, a relationship I am constantly attempting (usually unsuccessfully) to reconcile with the undeniably necessary need for more than three hours of sleep.

My best friend says I don’t sleep because I have Spirit work to do. I don’t know about that, but I do know I have stuff on my mind come 2am-ish. Sometimes sparkly stuff, sometimes serious stuff, sometimes wacky stuff, just stuff that wants to get out there.

So there you go, that’s me. Sparkly porphymaniac (nuts about purple) insomniac me.