Our Endless Sleepless Nights

Louise McLaren - 10 Jun 16

I started composing this blog post in fragments in my head during those endless middle-of-the-night feeds. I wouldn’t dream (ah, to sleep, to dream….) of writing it in the wee small hours because I’m now well aware of the impact of screen time on sleep. God knows, with my first baby, what all those texts I exchanged at 3am with my best NCT friend (‘is he clusterf&cking again overnight too? Aggggghh!’) did to worsen my already extreme levels of sleep-deprivation, but the moral support certainly helped on an emotional level.

This time round, with my second a few months old, I’ve been browsing facebook a bit too much, and all these articles on sleep issues in modern life that keep cropping up on my feed have been getting me in a right lather. What dastardly algorithm has come up with this? Has it picked up on the keyword ‘born’ in my birth announcement post? These articles, the latest of which, from fastcompany, declares that 6 hours of sleep is somehow worse than none at all, must be written by childless men. I totally understand that we have some real sleep problems in our culture – we don’t prioritise it; we fiddle around on our smartphones till we turn the lights off; we don’t stick to a regularish bedtime. But come on… The ‘torture’, as one article I read put it, of sleep deprivation common to our modern culture has nothing on the waterboarding of life with a small baby.

How do more mothers not collapse on the floor of the supermarket sobbing as they try to work out which strength of cheddar to buy? How do they manage to put one foot in front of the other in a reasonably straight line without veering sideways into a hedge? And how do they manage not to look like they’ve then been dragged through that hedge backwards (as I currently do)?

Nothing really prepares you for this. Pregnancy tiredness – that leaden feeling that washes over you and requires you to collapse on the sofa at 7pm – ain’t got nothing on night life with a newborn. Working hard and playing hard in your twenties, or pulling an all-nighter to write an essay at college… Nothing up till now approximates the feeling of chronic sleep-deprivation a baby brings. Antenatal classes focus on the birth. But I know I’m not the only one who’s got over even a difficult birth but remained haunted by the endless broken nights and cobbled-together snatches of sleep.

There is a traditional saying that will be widely familiar – ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. It’s tough-going these days when so many of us don’t have close family networks nearby to provide relief.

And there’s a traditional piece of advice – ‘sleep when baby sleeps’ that keeps cropping up. Apart from the absence of the definite article making my skin itch, this guidance makes me want to scream because some of us can’t nap. However exhausted I am, it simply won’t happen. It is a source of intense frustration that in theory you could be much less sleep-deprived if you could catch up in the day. And then of course when you already have older children, the whole idea of sleeping when ‘baby’ sleeps becomes much harder to achieve.

A friend asked me with some level of desperation the other day… ‘They say it gets better – when?!’. I remember with my first, in those hot summer evenings I’d be holding a sleep-fighting newborn and looking down at my neighbours having a barbecue with their teenage daughters and I’d feel insane jealousy. That was what freedom looked like to me.

Obviously it doesn’t take that long. Touch wood (I seem always to need to say this when saying anything positive about my baby son’s sleep) at four months it seems to be getting better. I know there are things I can do to make it as good as it can be for now. I also know that it’s not a linear process – teething, nursery illnesses, being away from home – there’s all sorts of crap that will disrupt things in time. And then weirdly, sometimes when they sleep well you can’t because you’re overtired or because you just want to enjoy a bit of downtime on the sofa in the evening, goddamit, and not lie in bed thinking you really need to be sleeping.

Now I have infinite empathy for the sleep deprivation other mothers (and fathers and caregivers) experience, I can’t help but think of the things NOT to say to a tired mum and what helps just a little. Because sometimes you just need a sympathetic word or two to help you motor on through, but it’s pretty bloody hard to find the right thing to say to a mother who is looking at you with a weird expression that is part-demented and part-glazed. And that’s with one eye – the other is swivelling towards her front door while you can tell she debates with herself whether she can just bolt it and leave you with the sleep thief for a bit.

Top of the ‘do not’ list is of course ‘sleep when the baby sleeps’, closely followed by ‘is she/he sleeping through the night yet?’ Which is particularly infuriating when asked of a tiny baby. Also a no-no is ‘been there, done that’ – it can be thought to suggest sympathy but will probably just sound like you’re a smug arse.

There are no particularly magic words on the flip side, apart from offering to take the baby for the night. And perhaps ‘fancy a massive slice of chocolate cake?’

Louise McLaren

Louise is a marketing consultant and mother to toddler Rory. She constantly finds herself thinking that her son is the most amazing thing in the world and she can't believe he exists, but a few seconds later that she must get away from the tantrums right this second and have a holiday... Where is her husband when she needs him?!

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