The funny (and not-so-funny) thing about sleep

The first few weeks are easy. Well, perhaps not easy, but the first few weeks are at least bathed in the shock and awe and bliss of having a new little person in your life. Waking up every two hours might not even seem that bad at first. Sometimes you may even stay awake just to watch your child sleep.

Then reality sets in.

Your husband goes back to work. The stockpile of meals in the freezer runs out. Your family returns to their lives (or to the other side of the country, in my case). Your house becomes a mess. You become a mess. Weeks or even months after the birth, your little one still won’t sleep for more than two or three hours at a time. And you slowly start to lose your mind.

People joke about it, especially if they’ve never had kids, or when it’s far enough in the past that they forget how bad it really was. But when you are in the thick of it, sleep deprivation is anything but funny. Well, maybe it is, but only in that delirious, wild-eyed way that makes you switch from laughing to crying and back again before anyone can even hand you a tissue. There is a reason why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. It makes you weepy, irrational and can even cause temporary insanity. Trust me on this one.

When you are talking to your childless friends about how tired you are, and they say “Oh, I know how you feel, I was out last night until 3am”, you may just want to kill them. A random stranger in the supermarket asks how you are, and you dissolve into a puddle of tears. Or you find yourself shooting daggers at your blissfully sleeping husband as you get up for the fifth time that night. When he innocently asks in the morning if the baby “slept through the night”, you barely suppress the urge to throw your coffee cup at him.

But perhaps the most bitter pill to swallow is when your friends, who also have new babies, tell you that their little ones are already sleeping seven or eight hour stretches. While you might be happy for them, you are also unbearably jealous. I thought I must be doing something wrong -- if other babies could sleep, why couldn’t mine? I cut out dairy for a month, then soy, hoping that would help. It didn’t. I tried using only cotton sleepers. I tried different diapers, different soothers, different blankets, different swaddlers, different mobiles, different nightlights. Nothing worked. I even spent an inflated $35 on a “miracle blanket” that looks like a baby strait jacket, hoping that would help. It didn’t. I quit drinking coffee to see if that was the issue. It wasn’t. (But that horrible experiment introduced a whole new set of problems. Caffeine, apparently, makes me a better person.)

But it gets better. Honestly, it does. My baby is nearly eight months old now, and he is finally sleeping straight through the night. Most of the time. He wakes up at 5:30am ready to play, but at least he’s not waking up every two hours like he used to. I’ll take what I can get.

Now that I am getting six to seven hours of uninterrupted sleep on most nights, I am a new person. I can think again. I’ve started reading the newspaper and political magazines. I’m trying to brush up on my Spanish. I’ve even started to creep out of my state of denial to think about working once again. Now, when I get six hours of sleep instead of seven, I catch myself complaining that I’m tired. Not long ago, I would have paid some serious cash to get even five hours of sleep. How quickly we forget.

Sleep makes us all better mothers. Now if only our babies knew that.