new baby – BATSHIT PARENTING

I had the misfortune of birthing not one, but two babies who just could not slumber for longer than two hours at a time. It almost killed me.

Until you yourself go through the throes of sleep deprivation it’s impossible to understand the sheer torture, desperation, and panic it instills. You get to the point where you actually fear falling asleep, because you know you’ll only be woken up again and the horror will begin all over again.

I tried a lot of things to make it better. I read a lot of books, surfed the internet for help, despaired to my GP. But I’ll tell you what I didn’t do: hire a sleep consultant.

Firstly, I didn’t have hundreds of dollars to blow on an initial consultation, let alone thousands of dollars for a full “sleep training package”. I find it astonishing (and, frankly, gross) that there are folks out there legitimately charging hundreds of dollars an hour to tell you what I’m about to tell you now. Secondly, I think the whole “sleep training” industry is a money-grab taking advantage of sleep-starved parents so desperate for relief that they’d do anything just to get some shut-eye.

You want to know how to sleep train? Here it is: You put the kid in the crib, say goodnight—and that’s it. You wait. They cry. You cry. And it is brutal. Oh sure, there are plenty of different “approaches”, with their own cute little acronyms (CIO, PIPD, etc). But listen: it’s all the same shit wrapped up in a different bow.

You can sit in the room while they scream until they (or you) feel like puking. You can leave the room and pop in and out at regular intervals while they scream until they (or you) feel like puking. You can slowly creep out of the room, bit by bit, over the period of week. You can just leave and not come back at all until they stop (or puke).

That’s what worked best with my first kid, who screamed for 45 minutes the first night, 20 minutes the second night, 5 minutes the third night, and started sleeping through the night after the third.

Or, if they’re still screaming three hours into it, you do what I did with my second: you give up. You take them into your bed, lie down with them, let them use you as a human soother, and adapt to sleeping with one boob in a tiny person’s mouth.

What you don’t do? Pay an unprofessional, unaccredited, unlicensed person to tell you to essentially ignore the kid until they nod off.

Sleep trainers do not have a degree in sleep. They’re not neurologists. They’re not psychologists. They’re not counsellors. They’re not medical professionals. They don’t need a license to call themselves “sleep trainers”. They don’t even have to take a course (although some private institutes will sell them).

But they WILL charge you the kind of fees that make you think they do.

Something weird happened after I had my first child.

After years of considering myself to be an independent, intelligent, ambitious young woman who—as the 80s girl power mantra went, could do “anything a boy can, but better”—my world imploded. I was not “the woman who has it all,” but a frazzled shell of a human whose domestic life suddenly felt like a scene out of Leave it to Beaver.

I took a year of mat leave, while my husband stayed at work. This left me in charge of keeping a tiny human alive, solo, for approximately 9 hours a day—in addition to prepping meals, attending the requisite baby classes, and attempting to keep the home in some state of order. It wasn’t anything that was discussed; I was the one in the home, and he was the one out of the home. We fell into it, obliviously, and before I realized it I was reliving my childhood, but from my mother’s perspective.

Despite her telling me over, and over again that that I could be anything, anything, in the world—a celebrated neurosurgeon, renowned artist, or even leader of the free world—I was, in fact, not much of anything at all. I was a mom. (Yes, I was blissfully in love with my baby. But I was also really, really, fucking tired.) And my mom, for all her ’80s-brand feminism, was in fact a woman who had put her own career plans on hold to raise three kids.

It didn’t take me long to realize that:

The work of caring for the baby wasn’t necessarily hard—but it wasn’t exactly mentally fulfilling. And what mental faculties I’d had were rapidly dwindling, along with my sleep.
The work was thankless. There were no colleagues sharing my work space, offering congratulations when I accomplished the feat of unloading the dishwasher, or vacuuming the house. No one called me out for praise when I successfully navigated a diaper blowout, or made it out the door without forgetting any of the infant’s accoutrements (the Sophie giraffe, the diaper cream, the burp cloths, etc).
My husband didn’t get it. Apart from the fact that there was now a baby in the mix, the rhythm of his day-to-day life was pretty much the same: wake up, go to work, come home, eat dinner. While mine consisted of nursing, burping, cleaning shit, and soothing—on an endless, merciless loop.
The love for your child is a cruel master. You will literally do everything for that tiny human: wake up every 90 minutes to nurse if that’s what is demanded; pace around the hallway for hours on end, jostling them, if it stops the crying; give up the foods that bring you joy because it seeps into your breastmilk and upsets their delicate stomach; sing the same stupid song over and over and over because it makes them gurgle.
My brain, and my soul, were slowly decompensating.

Here’s the dirty secret about motherhood that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough: You lose a part of yourself—at least for a few years. And you miss yourself. A whole hell of a lot.

And despite what they say, you truly, truly cannot have it all. You can be an awesome mom, you can have an awesome career, and you can be an awesome wife. But NOT AT THE SAME TIME. If you’re superhuman, you maybe hit two out of three.

As for me? There are many, many days when it’s a complete strike out.

Tag: new baby

Sleep consultants are taking advantage of us

Lies they told us