Personal Essay: #TeamNoSleep

When my son was about three months old, he began sleeping through the night, or for a minimum of 8 hours in one stretch.

Hell-to-the-YES.

 We were ecstatic, better-rested, and I had the energy to attend to oft-neglected parts of my body and home. A mere three months later[1], the world became fascinating to T (the world being our Brooklyn apartment and the park down the street), and sleep became a fleeting memory. Having outgrown his bassinet in our bedroom, we moved T into the crib in his room, which we hoped would result in better sleep for all of us. He began waking two to three times a night, or more, and it often took 30 minutes to an hour to get him back to sleep each time. As a bonus, he also had ceased napping during the day. It’s one thing to go from a non-sleeping kid to a sleeping one, but experiencing sleep regression? That was… humbling. (Not to mention that it is pretty disruptive for the little one.)

Your body and mind enter alternate dimensions when you operate on insufficient sleep. Sometimes, many times, in fact, I would cradle my son during one of these sessions and say “Sweetie, what’s wrong? Mama’s here.” Pop him on my breast, and manage to put him down in 30 minutes. Other nights, when I was less gracious, it would instead be more like “Oh my god, T. Why in the hell are you awake again? What do you want?!” And on the least gracious of the nights, I’d whisper-scream f-bombs before I tried to rock him to sleep.  On a few occasions, I was so tired that I couldn’t say anything at all, so I just held him closely and tightly, which is all that I could give in that moment. Often, I would cycle through all of these states in one night. It also happened that I occasionally pretended that I could not hear my baby’s hollers and tried to let him work it out on his own. He rarely did.

Illustration by Gloria Day

I started to feel nauseous more often; I couldn’t remember if I had brushed my teeth or showered or eaten; I resented my husband for being able to sleep through the cries, and genuinely wondered if I could push him out of the window and blame it on a moment of insanity; I questioned my choice to enter parenthood and marriagehood and anything that was not all-about-Vanityhood. And that damn post-partum body of mine was taking its time healing up.  I was stressed all around.

Around this time, we started reviewing literature on sleep-training, and lest you get too excited, my wonderful readers, we did not go through with any of the tried-and-true methods. One reason is that it seemed like another job—another set of tasks on a list of shit to do that was already too long and too prescriptive. The main reason is that when T first began sleeping through the night, it was not because we “trained him” to do so. We had a routine for him and stuck with it. The rigor of sleep training didn’t feel right to us—he was a teeny tiny baby, for goodness sake. If he needed us, we were right there, maybe not always with a smile and a cheer, but we were there. Sleep training advocates might suggest that our routine is actually the “so and so” method. Whatever. Don’t care, guys. Do what’s good for you, but hopefully, what is best for the baby, and pray that it is also good for you. Remember, babies eventually turn into toddlers, and then you are gifted a brand-new crop of “what do we do nows?” to fret over. But more importantly, if you dig into the recesses of your soul and recall the moments of life when you weren’t dog-tired, you realize that you have a steady stream of tiny moments and joys to be incredibly thankful for.

Friends, all of this is temporary. Sleep regression, too, shall pass.

[1] The baby doubled in age, and his body and mind were rapidly changing. For us though, it was a flash of time.