A meditation on sleep deprivation

If I don't fall asleep in the middle of it.

Parenting on a few hours of broken sleep.

My high school’s Senior Night was the first time I stayed up until sunrise. It started in our school’s transformed gym and ended in someone’s apartment –– me making out with a German foreign exchange student. Crawling into bed at 10am the next day, I thought, I had never felt so tired.

When my husband and I first started dating, he was assistant editing on a show, and would have to stay at work well after hours for feedback. As a result, our rendezvous’ would rarely start before midnight. Falling asleep at my desk at work every afternoon for two weeks, I thought, I had never felt so tired.

After my son was born, I didn’t sleep –– like, ever. It was all downhill from the moment my 32 hour labor started. He was a tiny baby and a total shit sleeper. For the first half of his first year of life, most of my tears, Google searches, and Amazon purchases were dedicated to figuring out how to get him to sleep. After almost a half a year of broken rest I thought, I had never felt so tired.

Then, I had a second baby and the meaning of tired transcended beyond anything I had ever felt or experienced. For months I have been living outside the shell of my little flesh sack of bones, watching the bags under my eyes darken and widen.

Before we had even left the hospital, this baby made it known that she preferred to be held. Her screams sounded as though she’d been practicing expanding her lung capacity the whole nine months of gestation. She was plagued with silent reflux and painful gas for months. People loved to compliment how awake and alert she was. Sleep was neither comfortable or interesting to my daughter and, in turn, made it difficult for me to be comfortable with or interested in her.

It wasn’t just that the universe decided to test me with a second baby who slept even more terribly at night, and fussed even more during the day. It was the compounded responsibility of caring for an energetic toddler, a house full of stuff, and a workload that fell back on my shoulders at only six weeks postpartum. It was the emotional exhaustion of running on fumes of inadequacy, resentment, and guilt.

Sleep deprivation was just one part of it. But also, a big part of it.

By way of choice and circumstance, I shouldered much of the sleeplessness these last few months. I’m naturally a lower sleep needs (a real thing!) person than my husband, and felt it was more important and helpful for him to be a well rested partner during the day –– which he is! But, I was breastfeeding, and nursing always felt easier –– to both feed and soothe. She was often inconsolable. And then there was my son! Living in our small quarters, we did everything to ensure our daughter’s piercing cries did not wake him. Waiting for a bottle to heat up in the middle of the night seemed like a recipe for screams and, frankly, I was too tired to deal with it.

And so, it was me. A lot of me –– mind, body, and every shred of sanity.

Did you know that the first night after a baby is born, they have a “birthday sleep?” They’re so exhausted from being born that they just sleep most of the night. I’ve had many a new parent friend text an update from the hospital, “They’re already sleeping like a champ!”

It’s hard not to reply, “Just wait.”

But, not everyone has to wait! Some babies sleep great. They give their parents long stretches. They are fine to be put down. They settle easily. They somehow sleep through the night at just a few weeks old.

The proliferation of the Internet has been a double edged sword for motherhood. On the one hand, there are so many resources at your fingertips at all hours of the day and night. On the other hand, that creates a cacophonous chorus of opinions, “experts,” and moms who all have the answers. It’s overwhelming and loud.

Not to mention all the comparison! Have a small baby who refuses to eat? All you see are the chonkers and all you can count are the ounces in the giant bottles they’re guzzling. Have a baby without hair? The only infants in your line of vision have lush locks pulled into cute pigtails. When your baby isn’t sleeping, all you can do is zero in on the ones who are. It’s hard to hate babies, even the ones on the internet you’ve never met but, when you’re sleep deprived, it happens.

I even started hating the real babies in my life. In a stroke of serendipity, multiple moms in my son’s preschool class gave birth to little girls within weeks of me. My son must think everyone gets a baby sister at age 2.5. All those babies SLEPT. When I’d catch up at drop off and pickup, the other mothers would lament that their baby was still waking once or twice in the night.

I wanted to cry. My daughter had given us a month of SOME sleep, and I felt optimistic, but her sleep had completely fallen apart with a culmination of the four month sleep regression, and moving her around during a home renovation. I had resorted to the thing I never thought I’d do: cosleep. I brought that baby into bed with me every night. Not that it helped get me any more sleep. She was still up every hour or so, but at least I didn’t have to leave my bed to address her needs.

Why did those babies sleep and mine didn’t?

There’s a reason the first question people ask when you have a new baby is, “How are they sleeping?” Or, “Are you getting any sleep?” It’s the same sick fascination of being compelled to look at a car wreck on the side of the road for as long as your neck will allow. You don’t want to see something bad … but also… you kind of do. “Thank goodness that wasn’t me,” you sigh.

I know that’s what you’re thinking when you ask me if I’m sleeping.

It’s kind of a stupid question to ask a new parent. You know the answer: NO. A common misunderstanding about sleeplessness with infants is that it’s about the lack of quantity. You can’t imagine what getting less than seven hours night after night feels like! But, the experience of being sleep deprived with a baby goes beyond the number of hours. It’s the quality of those moments of unconsciousness that strip you of any known version of yourself.

Four hours of sleep sounds brutal. Four hours of non consecutive sleep seems cruel. Four hours of non consecutive sleep where you were awake for an a half hour to two hours at a time seems unfathomable. Four hours of non consecutive sleep where you were awake for an a half hour to two hours at a time, or even woken every hour, for months on end is actual torture.

“How are you even functioning?”

I have been getting asked that… A LOT lately. Understandably. I’ve been tortured for almost half a year.

The answer is: not well.

The day after my baby turned five months old, we made the decision to do sleep training, just as we had done with our first child. I’d like to tell myself she was only half a pound away from the recommended weight to sleep train but I know it’s closer to a whole pound, or maybe even more. Rules schmules. I needed to sleep. BAD.

My husband took our toddler to his parents’ house in San Diego, while I stayed at home to let her (gently) cry it out. Our two children will share a room, so we thought it was easier to separate them while the baby learned to sleep in her crib.

This transition –– them sleeping together –– has plagued me since my first trimester. The day I peed on a stick, I seriously considered selling our two-bedroom house in favor of one with more sleeping space before my husband told me to think again. He was right, plenty (if not the majority) of siblings share a room for most of their childhood. More bedrooms was a luxury, not a necessity. We would figure it out.

I had been so traumatized by sleep deprivation the first time around, the thought of doing it again sent shivers up my spine. I did everything possible to make my son sleep in those first months, and it ended up working. Surely I’d need more space, sound machines, sleep sacks, even their own rooms, to replicate this intricate dance? How could they not wake each other, and us, up all night? Like I had been reassuring myself for an entire year, we would figure it out.

I would have liked to do this with my husband –– enduring your crying baby is TOUGH, even on the coldest of stone hearts, like my own. But, my mantra of parenting two children so far has been, “divide and conquer.” I had one week. I had myself and the sleep training program I’d used three years prior.

The first night was hard. A total of three hours of crying, wailing, and protesting throughout the night, despite my confident and reassuring “check-ins.” I called my husband, rousing him out of a deep sleep, at the hour mark of her crying at her first wake up. I couldn’t take it.

It got better. Every night she cried a little less and slept a little more. Every day she fussed a little less, and she smiled a little more. Go figure: getting good rest makes people … happy, at any age. Dividing and conquering parenting is hard, but has its silver linings. Without my husband and son at home, I was able to give her all my attention and, in turn, hers mine. As she began to sleep more, I started see her personality take shape. For the first time since she was born, it seemed like we were both becoming more comfortable and interested in each other.

Six days later, she (and I) finally slept through the whole night. It was time to bring my son home and stress test all the hard work she and I had done. All the Instagram toddler gurus emphasize the importance of preparing your child for big changes and, as such, I’d been talking this kid’s ear off about his new roommate, and the inevitable day when his sister would join him. I’m sure he tuned me out months ago, as he did not seem to care that bedtime would look different, and was successfully distracted by the new special “quiet time” toys I bought that only come out when his sister is asleep. We practiced whispering our goodnights and when the big moment came, we laid him in his crib, quietly professed our “I love yous,” and then we shut the door. They both slept. THE WHOLE NIGHT.

A freedom I had not known for so long washed over my exhausted body. This was a watershed moment in the transition to two kids.

But, the following night, I had a feeling luck could not strike twice in a row this early in the process. Still, I confidently put the Plan B pack’n play crib in our room away.

My gut was right. She woke up crying at 1 am and 4:30 am –– both for a half hour each time. My husband and I sat up in bed staring at the monitor, toggling back and forth between views of both our children, one asleep and one not. I increased the volume on BOTH the fancy sound machines in their room from my phone. She was still crying. I was sweating. I stared at the monitor intensely, vacillating between encouraging coaching words and desperate pleading. This was the worst it had been in days! Why was everything falling apart??

My nightmare –– the thing I had been so worried about for an entire year –– was happening. I was living the hypothetical scenario I had played over and over again with my (very patient) mom friends.

Finally she fell asleep again. My son never woke up once –– my greatest fear since the baby was the size of a poppy seed.

I’m a morning person for many reasons, one of them being coffee, but also because it has the magical ability to erase all the midnight scaries. It’s hard to have any perspective in the middle of the night, no matter what shit storm strikes, and a rising sun always eases panic. I was frustrated that the night had not been perfect, like it had already proven itself capable of being. But, at the same time, I was glad it turned out a bit messy and awful.

I saw the bad thing I had been afraid of seeing. I had no choice but to witness the car wreck, because I was the one driving. “Thank goodness it was me,” I thought. It wasn’t pleasant, but I came out unscathed, and I don’t have to live in anticipation of it happening.

I just know it will. I know I will be OK. I know it will get better. I know I will sleep again.

There’s not going to be one single day where the sleeplessness and the exhaustion of the last few months leaves my body. I’ll still wake up at 3 am because my body was trained to do so for months. It will be a slow release the more hours of rest and restorative time to myself I am able to clock. One day I will wake up and realize this most difficult season of life is in my rearview mirror. Life will feel more in sync and I will chide my past self, wondering why I worried so much. I know time is sneaky and manipulative, so maybe I’m writing all this down to remember that I can do extremely hard things when my memory goes all soft and rosy.

So, I guess, go ahead and ask me if I’m sleeping now. But, I warn you, it won’t be as thrilling to hear the answer anymore.