Disclaimer: This post has no useful advice on sleeping. Because if I had it, I would use it.
“So is anybody sleeping?” It’s a question I like to ask new parents. I don’t do this to know the status of their sleep deprivation. I do it to let them know that I have empathy. Usually the respondent waits a beat and nods knowingly with a frozen smile, like a remote news correspondent, waiting for a question to reach them through the wires.
If you’ve asked a couple they will trade nods, like corporate executives at an apology press conference, to decide who will field this question. They understand that this question is about more than sleep. This question is a way to acknowledge their personhood, at a time when it might feel erased in a mess of diapers, bottles, guilt, stress and night wakings.
They understand I am not asking for a detailed account of a sleep schedule. I am giving them fellowship. In that beat between question and answer, there is a lot. There is acknowledgement that when we go home as parents and the door closes and the outside face comes off, there is a war. A silent, noisy war. This war may look like it’s about sleep. Your kid’s, your own. But actually, this war is about more than sleep. It is a war between your old self and your new self.
The old self got to set her own times. The old self got to choose. The new self - also got to choose. But the new self made one big choice and the other choices faded into the hedge.
I, like most other new parents, experienced this rite of passage myself. And was confused by how little my good intentions translated into positive outcomes of the somnolent kind. It was clear that we weren’t doing enough, so we did more. We read all the literature, and followed more single letter acronyms than we’d ever done before. The five S’s, the 4 B’s, the 17 P’s. We did all the things, but we did not get a peaceful nights’ sleep the way we were promised.
The lack of sleep wore away at us. And it was in the depths of this experience that I looked across the room at my ex-boyfriend (now husband) and realized how you could genuinely hate the one you loved. In that fog of exhaustion, I could see ahead of me, how it all falls apart. And I got scared.
So I went to the place where lost and scared people really shouldn’t go, the internet. And that’s where I learned about sleep training. A term that I’d never heard of before children. What do you mean sleep training? What’s next? Breathe training? Actually, that is a thing (for details, see: Meditation).
Sleep training refers to the practice of helping a baby to sleep so that everyone in the household can stay sane. Learning about the existence of sleep training was a lighthouse to little me who was tossed in the waves. I flung myself at it with a gusto. I did this by going to the library and borrowing every book I could on the subject. It said to let the baby cry a bit. But not too much. But more than you’d think was ok. But no, not that much. But not that little either.
It was not only confusing, at times it felt physically difficult. When every ounce of my being felt wired not to let the baby cry, sleep training felt like a terrible idea. But I was desperate. So I went to my driveway and sat in the car and cried, while at home, my husband stood guard as the baby cried. We were just two people, crying together, apart. Even now, all these years later, I don’t like thinking about those days.
I told a friend about my struggles and she spoke to me with the words of someone who was done wasting time on the matter. “Listen. Your choice is this. You either cry now, or cry later,” she said. She was wrong, there was a third option, cry now and later. I felt that I was on that track.
So one day, in a fit of sleep-deprived desperation, I called a lady I found through the Facebook Mom Group. You know the group that makes you feel simultaneously like an absolute loser compared to the other moms, as well as seen in a way you’ve never been seen before? The group that beats your self esteem to a pulp but you cannot look away because truths are being revealed? Yes, that group.
It’s there that I found her. She was a sleep consultant and too many people swore by her for me to not be intrigued. She would get you uninterrupted hours of sleep. She would revolutionize bed time. She could save your marriage. She would give you back your life for the price of $500 for 2 video consultations.
It sounded simultaneously too expensive and too cheap for what was being offered. But that’s the thing about being desperate. It makes things that shouldn’t feel like good ideas, feel like good ideas. And here, it was paying a matriarchal stranger in Florida to tell me that it was ok to say good night to my child and leave the room.
Because, basically, that’s all she did. And the worst part, it worked! I cannot explain what happened, but after our video consultation, where she told us a bunch of stuff that we already knew, all three of us managed to get the best sleep of our lives - or at least, after the previous few months, what felt like it.
Unfortunately, as with any good habit that veers even slightly off the path of least resistance, we slowly edged back into our bad practices. And a few months later, found ourselves bleary eyed and back at square one. But it was not entirely our fault. The story kept changing on us. Like a video game that gets harder as your skill level goes up.
Oh, you managed to get a decent bedtime schedule? Not so fast, here’s a head cold.
Nice, I see you leveled up with a humidifier, well here’s a growth spurt - there are no devices for that. Take it.
Oh you did? Well here’s some teething! This one goes on for a while.
What’s that? You got a strong sleeper? We’ll trade that hubris in for a next child with a totally different approach to sleep. Have fun. See you at 2am. Hope you like coffee.
What could we do now? We couldn’t call Aunty Florida. The shame and reproachment would break us - assuming we weren’t yet broken. We could find a new sleep coach. But it felt like too much to be told what we already knew, a second time.
The thing is, we had misunderstood the value of the sleep coach. She didn’t have any secrets to impart to us. She simply was an impartial guiding voice that told us it was ok to try to be better. It sounds ridiculous now, but in our sleep deprived state, we had begun to believe that better wasn’t possible.
She didn’t give us sleep coaching, she gave us hope. Well, she also gave us some sleep coaching. But since we didn’t really stick with it, I’m going with hope. It’s a nicer tie-off for this essay which has to end at some point.
I was wrong to feel embarrassed about needing her help when so many of my friends didn’t. And my parents, who I like to think that I am better than in every way, also didn’t. But I was looking at it the wrong way. Even the greats need coaches (for details, see: Sports).
For we were not fools. Nobody said it would be easy. We had our eyes wide open. Or as wide open as they could be on three broken hours of sleep. What the experts didn’t prepare us for, was the voices over our shoulders - chiming in with helpful comments like “In our time, we didn’t do sleep training. We just let you fall asleep when you slept and you woke up when you did. You also heated up your own milk and fed yourself. And you gave yourself your own vaccinations. Come to think of it, you gestated yourself in your own amniotic sac that was plugged into an autonomous power source.”
Or, it can be your peers, seemingly able to handle these hurdles in their sleep (pun intended). That “Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, our perfect child sleeps from 7-to7” energy, when you are personally struggling is frankly, disrespectful. They should at least have had the decency to fake it.
Those voices from their varied sources are hard to handle. Because they speak of a promised land with no pain. Is that a real world? Or is it one sanded into shape over decades of slow drip amnesia? Or maybe one fashioned through the lens of social media and its culture of appearances at all costs? Ultimately, the question I was trying to answer was whether I was suffering for no reason.
I spent a lot of time wondering if everyone besides me was having an easy and great time. But it is the insidiousness of early parenthood, that so much of that very public joyful event, is so privately exhausting. But I am here from my past (in essay form) to assure you that like me and the baby all those years ago, we are all crying together, apart.
So, after all that drama with the sleep and those early days, did I get back to myself? The answer is yes, but no. Slowly, over the years I made my way back to a semblance of normal. With my feet on more solid ground, I looked for the old familiar self I’d left behind, only to realize she was no longer there. Like an old childhood house that you visit out of nostalgia, only to see that it’s been pulled down and an apartment complex built in its place.
I couldn't return to the old me even if I’d wanted to. I’d changed too much. I don’t want many of the things that old me wanted. And there are some new additions to my life that I’ve grown to accept. For example, I now have a home Advil and a purse Advil. And I love them both equally.
Sleep training babies may not be in the picture anymore, but I have new battles now. And out here in the thick of it, I’m not always sure what they are. As a result, I spend a lot of time playing this game I call “Is this a result of my [insert lifestyle choice] or is this perimenopause?” There is still insomnia and some unnecessary grumpiness, although this time I’m the perpetrator (for details, see: Perimenopause).Yet again, due to reasons beyond my control, I’m on the lookout for some external validation that I’m not alone.
In these times, I think back fondly to the days of sleep training (minus that one time I was crying in the driveway.) In the pit, it can be easy to think that nobody else is experiencing what you have and that you should be able to muscle through. But the days of sleep training showed me that it’s okay to seek help sometimes, even if it is for something that you cannot believe you cannot solve.
It is humbling to ask for help. But also liberating. Set yourself free and let a stranger charge you an obscene amount to tell you that it’s ok to do what you were already doing. For some of us, that's the only way.
Don't worry, you can trade it all in for an entirely different set of problems when they are teenagers.