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I come to the keyboard today feeling like a fresh new human. Yes, I got 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night and I feel incredible. I feel coherent. My body isn't screaming at me to lie down. I feel like I could do a LOT of shit right now.
When you are a caregiver for a tiny human, sleep rules your life, whether you want it to or not. It becomes an obsession, unwittingly and unwillingly (for me, anyway). Timing naps and wake windows, wondering whether it's okay for your child to be able to sleep only while touching you, wondering what you're doing wrong when the baby wakes up immediately upon being set down in the bassinet. Crying in the kitchen at 4:30am while your coffee brews because you are so. fucking. tired. Fighting off murderous rage by repeating to yourself: "She's not GIVING me a hard time, she's HAVING a hard time" when your toddler wakes up in the middle of the night, tossing and turning and sitting up and asking for milk and then lying down again (repeat for two hours).
After a good stretch of sleeping through the night, my child began waking up at weird times in the night/early morning and nursing nearly nonstop until the sun rose. One morning she woke up at 4:30am, another at 2:30am. I spent the rest of the night, in a half-awake/half-asleep state as she nursed, fell asleep, woke up, cried for milk, nursed, fell asleep, cried for milk, etc. It's a special kind of torture to be allowed to fall only halfway asleep for hours at a time.
Now, I'm making it sound like this lasted for weeks. It happened only two nights -- Tuesday and Wednesday. It was enough to feel like I had been awake for a hundred years. Time slows down when you're sleep-deprived and you've been pushed out of bed at 7am by a toddler shouting, "Get UP, mama! Get UP!" I feel like I'm just trying to make it to nap time so I, too, can maybe close my eyes. I've started to get headaches when I haven't gotten enough sleep (22-year-old night-owl me would be extremely weirded out by this), and I've started trying to practice "good sleep hygiene" so that even when I've had a bad night, I don't collapse into a heap.
Wednesday night was the worst night. 1.5 hours (maybe) of uninterrupted sleep. 5 hours of being half-asleep. I woke up with a whisper of a migraine. As my toddler ran off to "read her books" and I changed into my daytime sweatpants, I repeated a couple things to myself.
1. Stay cool. Remember, she can't help it. She's a toddler. She's not giving me a hard time. She's having a hard time. She doesn't know what's going on either. She's also not sleeping well.
2. This will not last forever. She will sleep again, and so will I.
When I was an extremely sleep-deprived fresh new parent, I did a lot of internet searching for anything about infant sleep, and also, was it normal for my 3-week-old to be attached to my boobs for hours and hours on end? (Yes, it is, and it's called cluster feeding. No one told me about it, so thanks to the NewParents of Reddit!)
I couldn’t ask any of my friends about these things because none of my friends have babies, and I couldn’t ask my mom — the one person I wanted to ask the most — because she’s no longer on this earthly plane. It was an extremely lonely and isolating time. I sent desperate prayers into the universe for my mom to visit me in a dream (as if I slept deeply and long enough to dream in that era of life) so she could give me advice and tell me what she did with me. The one thing she did tell me when she was alive was that baby-me was a terrible sleeper and cried all the time, so I was certain she would have something useful or comforting to tell me.
Instead, I had to rely on myself. And the internet.
Lots of people claim to be experts on baby sleep, and many of the people who claim to be experts make a lot of money off making sleep-deprived parents feel terrible about "creating bad habits" with their babies. When you're desperate to do the "right thing" for your kid and when you feel like your arms are going to fall off from rocking your child to sleep, you just want someone to tell you what to do. And there are a lot of people who will tell you what to do, especially if you pay them money.
For me, there was a lot of advice that made me feel like I was fucking up my kid by doing certain things. Feeding her to sleep (even though it's biologically normal to do that -- literally, when you nurse, hormones are released that make baby and caregiver sleepy). Holding her while she slept. Co-sleeping/bedsharing safely. All of it was, according to 'experts,' laying the foundation for "bad habits" that would ensure my child would never be able to sleep on her own and that she would be sleeping in our bed until she left for college. I read things that told me not to make eye contact with my baby in the middle of the night because it was too stimulating and would keep her up all night. I made jokes with my husband about it ("Don't look her in the eye!"), but one night, after rocking her for what felt like hours and avoiding eye contact with her because it might be too stimulating and keep her awake (even though she was already awake!!), I thought, Wait, what the fuck? I shouldn't make eye contact with my baby? This tiny being who has been living inside my body and has no idea what the fuck is going on out here? I should treat her like a creepy stranger on the street? What???
So I looked down at my sweet girl's face and *gasp* made eye contact. I stroked her eyebrows, her chin, her cute little unibrow. I kissed her on the forehead and held her close. Her eyelids grew heavy almost instantly, and she fell asleep.
From then on, I knew that I had to trust my gut when it came to how to care for my kid. I'd never been a parent before, but I knew how to be a human and I knew how to care for another human being. Caring for another human being simply requires empathy and a recognition that the person you are caring for is another human -- no matter how small, how young, how old, how mobile, how healthy, how sick. They are a human, and they should be treated with respect and dignity.
Because babies can only communicate by crying (and sometimes mysterious hand gestures that are supposed to signal that they're hungry), we forget that they are humans. They have minds, they can and do process the world, what’s going on around them, and how people respond to them. They have mental health. They are biologically wired to connect to their caregivers so they can survive. They are wired to tell us that they need something by crying. Crying is, in fact, our very first form of communication. Crying is always a message, an ask for connection — whether you're a baby, a toddler, or a full-grown adult.
(Also, their little brains are still forming! Their little brains will be forming until they're 25 years old! When they're so young, all they know is the comfort of the womb! And now they're out in this cold, bright, weird world, and they just want something familiar and comforting -- their caregivers! They can't do things their brains aren't developed enough to do (like sleep through the night by themselves! or regulate their emotions! or “self-soothe.” Many adults can't even do these things and *their* brains ARE fully developed (yikes!)!).)
My kid is now 2 and a half years old, and we're here. Bedsharing, nursing to sleep, contact napping, following our guts. We have more good nights than bad, but when the nights are bad, they feel really terrible. The terrible nights feel like they go on forever, but the reality is: it all changes. The tough times pass. From birth to now, we have lived through so much change. I know that one day, she will want to sleep in her own bed, and I'll be so happy and so sad and so proud at the same time.
I try to remind myself of this when I am about to lose my shit. I am not always successful at not losing my shit. Yesterday, after the worst night, I did several things to survive the day:
drank a lot of water
spent time in the sunshine
ate a high protein breakfast (scrambled eggs with ricotta)
did some yoga for energy (always with Adriene)
did a meditation for inner peace (again, with Adriene!)
threw together some whole wheat raspberry scones in a normal amount of time and popped them in the oven before my kid got home from swim lessons
napped while my kid napped
breathed a LOT
I have to remind myself, though, that even though yesterday felt like a good day despite the exhaustion, I don't have it all figured out. I, actually, never will, because every day is different. And that's okay. It's okay to take the day as it comes. To take a few minutes to close my eyes, imagine my mother’s voice and what she might say to me. Listen to my body and heart and spirit so I can do what I can to take care of myself so I can take care of my kid. What worked yesterday may not work on the next hard day.
Everything changes, nothing lasts forever.
But I did have everything figured out yesterday, though, and I will take that win.
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