by Frances Cooke
Sleep, oh sleep.
My entire first year of being a mum revolved around it, or the lack of it. My son is now nearly five and my memories of being immediately post-partum are pretty hazy, a combination of the brain's natural tendency to forget and the black hole of sleeplessness we experienced that year. I went back to look at the emails and texts I sent that year and nearly everything contains a reference to it - to nap schedules, sleep consultants, plans made and cancelled after bad nights, musings about when it would end, if it ever would end and we would ever get more than snatches of sleep again.
I was lucky that after a long labor my son was born pretty smoothly, and took to breastfeeding without too much trouble. Those first few weeks were lovely, getting to finally see this little person I felt like I knew so well already. Everything seemed to be going okay until the fourth week when he just started to cry, and he cried all the time.
I wrote to my lactation consultant:
“O has been becoming increasingly fussy over the last week. It has gotten to the stage in the last few days where he is crying anytime he is not on the breast or sleeping, and he will shriek and get himself really worked up. He doesn't fall asleep after feeding any longer, and is so very hard to settle with all the swaddling, swings etc in the world. I am worried that he is still hungry after breast feeding, as whenever he comes off the breast he cries to go back on.
He is now just over 4 weeks old and is more and more fussy each day, crying almost every spare minute.”
I have a vivid memory of trying to walk around the corner to meet two friends and their babies for a coffee around this time and my son being absolutely inconsolable - just crying and crying and crying, until we both eventually arrived at the coffee shop in floods of tears. Nothing ever worked; not swaddling, not white noise, not the swing, not the car. He was healthy and he fed well but never settled, and around this time, getting him to sleep started to involve hours of bouncing on the yoga ball, after which he would sleep an hour or two and wake up to do the whole thing all over again.
I felt exhausted, frustrated, constantly worried that we were doing something wrong, that I was doing it wrong, or that there was something that we were missing. I also felt so sad, disappointed that this special time with my baby was escaping me, my dreams of peaceful mornings and playdates with friends, going to baby classes, post-partum yoga, travel, were out of the question because my baby cried constantly through every car ride, and every outing required steeling myself mentally for getting there and being prepared to bail when things inevitably started to go south. Baby massage was a total fail as he shrieked through the whole thing until we finally gave up. I felt lonely, and so envious of other parents whose babies seemed to just sit there and gurgle then drift off to sleep, when mine was this little ball of rage, this little gremlin that needed constant wrangling. And then of course I felt guilty for that envy, and for resenting my own baby. I loved him so much but taking care of him was so hard, and relentless, all through the day and all through the night as he never slept more than a couple of hours at a time, and every nap time was a battle of wills.
When he was four months old we started exploring help from sleep consultants. We had just come back from a trip to the UK to see our families (why did we do that?!). The jet lag and the unfamiliar environments did not help and we were starting to unravel. After a heart-breaking and unsuccessful experiment with cry-it-out sleep training we found a sleep consultant who would work with us for the next 6 months in our quest to get some sleep.
I’m not sure how much of it was the sleep strategies and how much was him growing up (although it sure did help my mental health to have that help and support from the sleep lady). Finally, at the age of 12 months my son finally slept through the night for the first time and at 15 months was sleeping through consistently, and our lives changed completely. Parenting was still hard, but not the total black hole we had been stuck in before. He’s such a lovely, happy, (well-rested!) chap now it’s hard to believe where we were a few years ago, but it had a huge impact on us, and it took us a good three years to even talk about having another baby when, of course, COVID hit. He’s now nearly 5 and likely to be an only child, and I’m trying to come to terms with that.
We started this series to acknowledge the fact that parenthood is hard, (much harder than is ever imaginable before it happens) and that motherhood is a unique experience that is physically and mentally life-changing, often joyful, rewarding, inspiring, but also draining, frustrating, boring even. I’ve gained so much through becoming a parent, but I’ve definitely lost a little too, and during that black hole year I struggled hard with the loss of my personal freedom, the opportunity to do the things that fed my soul and made me feel like myself, and even realizing that was hard through the fog of sleeplessness when it felt like things would never change. But they did, and my favorite and only parenting mantra is now “all things shall pass, and this shall too”.
Frances' story is part of our Rewrite Postpartum series. To share your own story, use the button below.
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