Baby sleep: mind numbingly all-consuming.

Is there anything in motherhood as simultaneously obsessively all consuming, and absolutely mind-numbingly BORING as sleep? We wish we had it in us not to care at all, but instead find ourselves doing hours of mental nap maths a day - which isn’t easy for someone who stopped doing maths in high school at 15 years old. 30-year-old me in flailing under the mental load.

This is the topic that has most made me not want to do any of this ever again, but is also one I can (and often do) go on and on about for hours. Before getting pregnant, sleep deprivation was by far my biggest fear of parenthood, and I live with that anxiety daily. I’ve always been a sleepy person, no matter how much rest I’ve gotten. I’ve always been the person who can sleep anywhere, any time, in any conditions because I am literally always tired enough to crash. I am not a good candidate for broken sleep, and the promise of such was my biggest hesitation in making the decision to be a Mum. Now that I’m here, I’m forever waiting for the sleep deprivation to hit and hit HARD. I’ve read comments on forums that say things like “no one ever told me that you could literally hallucinate from sleep deprivation” and I’ve thought, shit, I’m a little tired but when am I going to start seeing dragons? In an effort to outrun the dragons, I’ve spent 6 months trying to desperately get ahead of the lack of sleep by reading every reddit post, every clickbait article, every Google result, a few science journals, a few Facebook groups, a few Instagram reels, lots of texts from friends, buying a few sleep school programs and tracking my baby’s sleep. This has consumed me for half a year, and the entirety of my daughter’s life. Will the obsession ever end? I fucking hope so, because I am so goddamn bored of thinking about baby sleep!

The tyranny of the app.

Since Esther was a few weeks old, I’ve been tracking her sleep in an app. It’s something I’m actually quite embarrassed by and slightly ashamed of, even though I know I shouldn’t be and that feeling is just internalised Mum-guilt telling me that I should know and be better than an app. Which may be partially true, but regardless of the complicated feelings around it, for 6 months straight I’ve timed Esther every time she closed her eyes. I was hoping to find patterns, clues, little tid-bits of info that would help me be a better Mum, get her better rest, and sleep more myself.

The thing is, Esther slept great as a newborn. We were incredibly lucky that she entered the world with her circadian rhythm all set in the right direction, and after 2 weeks of forcefully waking her every couple of hours to eat, once she was back at birth weight she started sleeping 4-6 hour stretches regularly. Our nights from 1-3 months were predictable. She’d wake once. One 6-ish hour stretch, a feed, then a 4-ish hour stretch. I’d go to bed at the same time as her, and we’d all slumber peacefully. She slept in her bassinet next to my side of the bed, no worries. Lewis and I could have extensive conversations right next to her head without waking her. Everyone told us that she was such a “good” sleeper and it must mean we were doing something “right”. No matter how much I tried to tell people that it was just luck and her temperament and we had nothing to do with it, they would assure us, no, it’s you, you’re doing a good job, so she’s a good sleeper, and since she’s a good sleeper now, she always will be.

Then she turned 12 weeks old.

Literally the night she turned 12 weeks old, her sleep changed.

Slightly more night wakings, less predictability.

And as the weeks and months have rolled on, it’s just gotten… I hesitate to use this word, but worse.

Esther woke up to the world. Our little sweet potato started rapidly learning new skills, became more sensitive to noise and conversation, grew out of her bassinet and into her cot, had developmental leaps and god knows what else goes on with babies, and her sleep is impacted.

At the moment, she’s waking more than she ever has before. Significantly more than when she was a newborn, and a lot harder to calm and settle. She’s strong, she can arch her whole body out of my arms, and her cry is impressively, ear-ringingly loud.

The past week, she’s become a co-sleeper. She used to love her cot, sleeping with her arms out wide beside her like a slumbering little Jesus, but now she wants to be close to us.

A month ago she seemed to be asking for space to sleep, to be put in her cot and fall asleep herself. Now, she demands the boob like her life depends on it (nevermind that her life literally does depend on it, she acts like I’ve withheld it from her!), and cries when you place her in her cot overnight. Naps in there, that’s fine. But once the sun goes down, that place is no good.

And how have I changed since she was 12 weeks? Like a fucking broken pendulum.

One week I am deep in the trenches of individualism and sleep training. Babies need to be taught to be independent, you’ll never get them out of your bed once you let them in and maybe you shouldn’t love them too hard cause they‘ll use that to manipulate you.

The next week, I’m checked out. She’ll sleep when she sleeps, I don’t care. I even have a little song I sing to us when she’s not sleeping that tries to reassure me that it’s fine. Until she starts getting really tired and cranky, with piled up sleep debt.

Then I’m on to hermit-mode. We don’t leave the house. The focus is on getting this girl some decent rest. I don’t need or want for anything beyond these walls and her white-noise drenched cot.

Then it reassures me to research biologically normal baby sleep. They wake to protect themselves from SIDS, they need to be close to us because we are carry-animals, they need to feed at night because human milk is not very fatty and is easily digested.

Then we have a particularly hard night and I’m back to wondering if I need to train her in some way, if there are gentle ways, how much crying is too much, how much do I mind her being in bed with us, what are our limits if we don’t think or wonder about social expectations or norms?

Some nights I try letting her fuss in her cot for a while, see if she goes back to sleep on her own (approx 30% success rate). Other nights I’m up at the first unhappy cough-cry (why wake up with such an inherently irritating sound?!) and putting her straight into our bed. She’ll end up there eventually, why fight it.

And round and round and round I go.

All the while, tracking and tracing and examining her sleep.

What have I learned in the 6 months of data gathering and analysis?

Esther has a 13 hour sleep need. No matter what, she sleeps about 13, to 13.5 hours over 24 hours.

That’s it.

That’s what I’ve learned from all the times I stopped and started and reset timers. Every time I sat and stared at the graphs, data and averages, trying to find patterns.

Perhaps that is why, a few nights ago, when she woke for the 4th time that hour, I reached for my phone as I always did before responding to her, ended the timer and never turned it back on again. What was the point, I thought, in knowing that she’s woken 10 times since bedtime? It doesn’t change it. It just burdens me with another task. Not only do I have to respond with compassion and patience to a baby who is having a hard time, I also have to remember to time it. It’s a job I was imposing on myself. I don’t need it.

To be fair, without my app telling me how long Esther has been awake or asleep or suggesting when she should nap next, I do feel a bit lost. It’s why I went back to the app when she was 3 months old and I initially tried to leave it behind. I was so lost that I was in a panic, and quickly jumped back on the wagon for the comfort of the (false) sense of control it gave me. It’s taken another 3 months for me to be confident enough in my mothering skills to (hopefully) drop it for good. Admittedly, I haven’t been great at choosing her nap times without help. It’s tricky not having a rough idea of when bedtime might be. But I’ll keep trying to be gentle with myself as I learn a skill that I’ve outsourced for so long. I have a new 15 minute rule that comes in handy when I misinterpret her and try for a nap at the wrong time. If she’s not asleep in 15 minutes, get up, get her out of her sleep suit, leave the room and try again in 15-20 minutes. I’m hoping that this wont need to be used every nap for long.

All the while, my baby will wake, my baby will sleep, and I will be with her. That’s gotta be better than an app.

Sleep rules and all the ways my baby doesn’t give a fuck about them.

In my first-time-Mum Googling, I’ve come across the same advice and “rules” for baby sleep countless times. Every goddamn website with the right SEO settings to appear in my sleep-related searches says the same things. Drowsy but awake. Wake windows. Independence. Don’t feed to sleep. Don’t create bad habits. Routine. Sleep hygiene. Sleep pressure. Sleep debt. Sleep associations. Pre-bed baths. Baby massage. Act on early sleepy cues; if she yawns, you’re too late!

Does my baby know about these rules? Evidently not.

Has my child ever made it to the end of the day without being completely wired and miserable before bed? No, never. Every night is a sprint to the finish line fueled by misery and whinging. This is not conducive to a calming bedtime routine. We rush through while she gets increasingly incensed and eventually falls asleep.

Do I know my child’s sleepy cues, and get onto them as soon as they appear to ensure a smooth nap and bed routine? I know them, sure, but I don’t act on them. Esther throws out the most dramatic cues LONG before she’s willing to actually sleep. Any time I try to help her sleep before she’s showing raw and abject unhappiness, it takes hours to get her to sleep. If I wait it out until she’s whining like a lawn mower, rubbing her eyes and trying to eat my face, then she might maybe be able to fall asleep within the next 20 minutes. No guarantees, of course.

Does my baby like a bath, book, bed routine? Absolutely not, thank you. She hates the bath, books are uninteresting and her bed is questionable at best lately.

Do I know how to help my baby wind down for sleep? Also no. Is she someone who needs to get her sillies out before sleep, or someone who needs quiet and dim lighting? I have no idea yet. She’s a baby! I only met her 6 months ago!

Drowsy but awake? Fuck off, mate.

All of this is to say, my baby doesn’t know or follow any rules, no matter how much the world insists she should. This has often made me feel like a failure, like I’m missing something obvious, that my routines and choices aren’t right. And again, maybe that’s true, maybe I’m flailing in the dark here because I’m new to this, but damnit, the sense of failure isn’t helping. Are we creating bad habits and sleep associations? Very likely, yes. She struggles to fall asleep without a boob in her mouth lately, but that’s not a problem for anyone but me, so is it really a problem at all? We do what works for us at the time, and will suffer the consequences of trying to change it later. That is, if we decide it needs to change at all. As for labeling Esther a “good” or “bad” sleeper - it’s unfair on her and on us. Having to live up to the label of “good” sleeper is undue pressure on a human who quite literally only just entered the world, only has one means of confusing communication, and is growing and learning so much that they probably physically hurt sometimes - if only she could tell us so! Labeling her a “bad” sleeper is dismissive of her personhood, the immense effort she has to put into every single thing, and just plain not bloody nice. There’s no such thing as a “bad” baby. How cruel to think as such. There are just babies and parents, each doing their best. The important thing is that I’m not hallucinating dragons by insisting she sleep in her cot when she’s not happy to and therefore not getting any rest, she’s not losing her voice from screaming alone in the dark, and our fledgling bond is surviving hourly wake ups. What more could a first time Mum hope for in their first 6 months on the job?

For full transparency though, I’m currently in a “she’ll sleep when she sleeps” phase. Maybe ask me again next week.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to stop writing, my baby just woke from a nap…