In 2020, I thought a lot about sleep
Published on 12 December 2020
Before I had children I didn't think that much about sleep. It was just something that happened without any real conscious effort on my part. Lights off, head down and a solid eight hours would beckon.
In 2017 I had my daughter and sleep (or lack thereof) became an obsession: I read books, despaired with my husband and bought all the must-have miracle cure items such as Ewan the Magical Dream Sheep and calming lavender pillow spray.
My daughter is now three and sleeps pretty well (save for the occasional interruption from a shadow mistaken for a monster or toilet pit stop). But 2020 was another sleep-starved year for me as I had my second child in March (the day before lockdown 1.0).
These are the things I learnt:
1. Not sleeping when you really want to is bloody awful. This year it occured to me for the first time that it really is a terrible biological design to make newborns so unrelentingly exhausting. My husband informed me that some scientists think it might be nature's way of putting people off having too many children. I haven't checked this fact for myself but if it is true it certainly works. The downside is that when you have only slept for circa two hours it is hard to summon up the reserves for a fun and stimulating outing to the park (not to mention stopping the baby from ingesting pen lids, whole grapes, plastic figures etc).
2. I have never had real insomnia but I now know the true torture of being kept awake when you really need to rest. Sleep, it turns out, is a skill that needs to be practised and honed. Consider that a baby is born not even really knowing the difference between day and night, let alone that they are supposed to calmly drift-off without a peep of complaint. The result is learning to sleep is like potty training but worse because you are up at 3am, completely miserable and the baby has no clue what you are saying/doing (and probably neither do you by that point).
“Sleep, it turns out, is a skill that needs to be practised and honed.”
3. If you spend night after night waking up every two hours your body and brain become so addled that you too will lose the knack for staying asleep and will startle awake on schedule even when the baby has finally dozed off. You will forget what it was like to be truly refreshed (mythical, like a hot cup of tea).
4. During the first lockdown there were lots of articles about the importance of getting a good rest and the perils of staying up all night worrying about airborne germs. These articles also always point out that not sleeping enough kills brain cells and just generally makes you feel terrible (again, why was it designed this way? Those brain cells don't grow back!) These articles will make you feel worse.
“The conventional wisdom goes that newborn sleeplessness is a temporary phase and like all things will eventually pass. This is of scant comfort when you are six months in and are still wrestling with your small and often very sad person twice every night.”
5. The conventional wisdom goes that newborn sleeplessness is a temporary phase and like all things will eventually pass. This is of scant comfort when you are six months in and are still wrestling with your small and often very sad person twice every night. Somewhere around the September point my husband and I broke and bought a musical owl (an upgrade on the sheep as it auto-activates) and a book which suggested strategies for weaning our boy off his multiple night meals. The owl was a wash-out but we have made some bleary-eyed, coffee-powered progress with the book so we are now down to one waking per night (hooray!) but have begun the onset of the (very) early rising.
Needless to say this will be our last baby.