A sleep journey; on doing what works, until it doesn't
It’s the one thing I was consistently warned about while pregnant. “Enjoy your sleep while you can, it won’t be like that for long”, it’s something you tend to hear on the regular (although, I would argue that having to walk downstairs onto cold tiles to go to the loo for the fifth time in the middle of the night isn’t exactly restful sleep). I don’t think one can ever truly prepare themselves for the years of nights to come, but there’s something that I do think we should prepare ourselves for. And that’s to be prepared to chuck every single preconception of nighttime parenting out the window.
No sleep journey is going to look the same, and, undoubtedly, every single child is different. So placing our own preconceptions of how we are going to do things on a child yet unknown is irrational. We are told that society’s own perception of baby sleep is very much off the mark, and yet I know that I found myself wrapped up in a web of schedules and times, routines and windows.
We ran the whole gamut, and I remember thinking as the smug mother of a “clockwork newborn” that my god, this is easy. The first nights were hard, but as my tiny daughter slept in a bassinet beside me I almost wondered what others were talking about. But, as it so often does, the fog rolled in at around four months as the famous regression hit. And it was hard but not quite dog-tired hard. Naps were awful and sometimes my arms would give way as I sat up in bed to feed, but eventually sleep she would and back into the woven moses basket she would go.
Co-sleeping or bedsharing terrified me. I’d heard too many horror stories, my anxious brain couldn’t take it. No matter how tired I was, there was no way I would ever even attempt it. And six months sat there in the periphery, this milestone, as did a blue cot in a nursery that for some reason I was so excited to put her in. And then Eilish moved out of ours and into her own, and I would spend freezing cold midnight hours in an uncomfortable rocking chair, perfect face illuminated by yellow street lamps, and oftentimes I would find my way back into a warmer bed only to hear a cry from the next room. But it wasn’t too bad, snatches of sleep were still had after all.
Until, it was. And at just over one year the nights were full of anxiety. And I would dread the night time hours, and Eilish would cry in her bed and laugh in hers and nothing, nothing at all would coax her back. My breasts were no longer lulling her into the tendrils of sleep, but she would cry for milk. She wanted to get up and play, and so we did because I soon learned that giving in was often much better than fighting it. On and off for months, sleep would evade and then return until the blessed eighteen month mark came and coincided with a huge developmental shift in Eilish and we night weaned. We didn’t wait for a milestone, but if there’s a next time I don’t know if I would wait that long again, or then again maybe we would continue on for much longer.
The glorious sleep I so desperately needed came, and some days I’d get her up out of her cot in the morning and other times she’d wake with her face pressed up against mine but it really didn’t matter.
It’s never always that easy, it’s never a full-stop with sleep, and when we moved from country to country we did our fair share of bed-hopping until we settled on three in a row, a small body falling asleep in a big bed and then being gently moved into the smaller one up against ours for the rest of the night. Sometimes she crawls into ours in the wee hours and we sleep just like that, and other times I wake with a dead arm and a stiff neck and back she goes into her own. We do what works from moment to moment, and, honestly, most nights we don’t hear a peep until the morning.
If I had another, would I do the same? Maybe so, but probably not. There’s no part of me that wishes we had done another way, but the next child would be different and now so am I. For one, I know that the horrors of bedsharing tend to be fictitious and conditional and not always fact. Yet the nights of sleep lost are scarring in their own way, and even if we have a bad night now I am too easily lulled back to those days of desperation. I don’t think until now I really noticed that my anxiety was at its highest then, that the panic attacks and feeling just a bit broken coincided with the peak of sleep-deprivation. In some way, I wonder how affecting the average parent’s sleep-deprivation is, and how little we understand its effects on a parent’s psyche.
Sleep is one of those totally contentious subjects. I believe it’s a defence mechanism; it’s much easier to see things as black and white, to believe that our way is the only possible way, if we are tired and broken ourselves. I think if we’ve only come out the other side can we really see that it’s different strokes for different folks, and, even from one week to the next, we do what works, until it doesn’t.
Three TIPS FOR CALMER BEDTIMES:
Consider what stops you from sleeping
And then try to eliminate those same things for your child. Shutting off loud noises from the outside, eliminating blue lights before bedtime, incorporating a warm bath and a warm drink. All of these small acts add up to make it easier to drift off.
it lies in the consistencies
The same ratty bunny gets tucked up with Eilish every single night before three sleeps and then an audiobook to fall asleep to. Strong sleep associations can help a child fall asleep every night, but can also help bridge the gap between sleep cycles. If you can layer those associations then it can also mean that falling asleep without one is possible, say if you don’t want to feed them back to sleep every time.
They were right, sleep begets sleep
There’s a reason that our children wake up frequently if they stay up a little later or miss a nap, overtiredness unfortunately does prevent our children from sleeping well. Those old wives were right on this one.
Let go of expectation
Easier said than done, but I know on the nights that I want to get out of the bedroom to watch a movie or to get some work done, that will be the night that Eilish struggles to fall asleep. Try your best to take a deep breath and be present, they can sense the antsy in you.
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