The alarm went off at 5 am yesterday morning. I opened my eyes and then I had a revelation. Oh my God, there are no children in my bed. They sleep in their own beds all night long and don't come in to bother us in the middle of the night anymore. This school year is the first time that this has happened. It has FINALLY happened.
My husband and I literally endured sleep deprivation for 10 years. An entire decade. For an entire decade we did not experience 7 hours of sleep consistently for more than 3 days at a time. TEN YEARS. That's an entire decade.
I recall being pregnant with my oldest daughter and people saying things like, "Get as much sleep as you can now because you won't get any when your baby comes." I thought, Of course, babies don't sleep well, we'll get through it. Someone should have said, "SERIOUSLY LADY! YOU WON'T SLEEP GOOD EVER. GIVE IT TEN YEARS."
Sure enough my daughter was a horrible sleeper, the worst. When she was a baby she was up at least very 2 hours at night. Put her down at 8, up at 9:30, put her down at 10:00, up at midnight and refused to go to sleep and cried for an hour, put her down at 1:30, up at 3:00, put her down at 3:30, up again at 6 am...just as my husband was going to work. I used to think, Please, PLEASE don't leave me. It was the worst.
She didn't nap during the day, she would take random half-hour cat naps IF I was holding her. She went through a period where she would only sleep if the lights were on. If we tried to turn off the lights she would wake up SCREAMING immediately. That lasted at least a few weeks. We slept with the lights on over our bed.
When she was an older baby she would wake up in the middle of the night and want to play. I would do anything to try to get her to go back to sleep. Rock her, nurse her, make sure there was no stimulation but to no avail. She would get tired eventually and would lay down and try to dowse off. I had to pretend like I was sleeping and that was the only way she would go back to bed. God forbid, I opened my eyes to peek and see if she was asleep because if she wasn't and she saw me open my eyes, she would be wide awake again and start the process all over again.
We tried everything, read every book on the subject and nothing seemed to work. We resigned ourselves to it. When she was 12 months old, she was still waking up 4 times a night. I thought, "I'll night wean her, then she will surely sleep through the night." No, no she didn't.
Eventually she started waking up only 1 or 2 times a night but when that happened she started refusing to actually go to sleep at night. We figured out the quickest way to get her to go to sleep was to drive her around in the car. We could do 1/2 an hour of driving or have a 2 hour battle at home. It was for our own survival We would give her a bath, put on her diaper and PJs and read her a book and then we would all load into the car. We just drove anywhere.
You couldn't look back at her to check if she was asleep because, once again, if you looked at her she would perk right back up. We'd be driving along and my husband would say, "Is she asleep yet?" I would check the rear view mirror and see her with her eyes closed. I whispered, "Yeah, but I don't think it's safe yet. Just drive down to the Circle K and that should do it." We did that for about four months.
Then we decided it would be a good idea to have another baby and our youngest child took the sleep deprivation to a whole new level. She actually slept better as a baby, she would only wake up 1 or 2 times a night but our 2 year old was still waking up once a night.
When she was 3 or 4 my oldest daughter started sleeping all night. IF she was sleeping in our bed. That was fine, she was sleeping so that was a miracle. However, she is a sleep walker so sometimes I would find her wandering the room in the middle of the night and have to get up to redirect her back to bed.
My little one is my up-all-night-forever child. She also is a sleep walker. I caught her once in the middle of the night trying to use the bathroom in my closet. She went through an 18 month period where she had horrible night terrors and would wake up in the middle of the night SCREAMING and you would have to go in and hold her tightly to get her to go back asleep.
When we weren't be awoken by children roaming the house and screaming bloody murder, we would just get woken up by kids coming in our bedroom in the middle of the night and crawling into our bed - pushing us to the side to get a cozy spot right in the middle. I've probably spent 1,000 nights of my life cliff hanging off the edge of the bed with an elbow in my back.
Sometimes they would wake me up to just tell me things. At 3 am I would be poked and have to know that they need to use the bathroom, take off their fake fingernails, or to look at the bug bite on their leg.
The struggle is real. I used to talk to moms who would complain to me that their 6 month old baby doesn't sleep good and I had no sympathy. "Well, my six year old doesn't sleep good, so you can just go cry to someone else that cares." Then there are the moms whose kids sleep 20 hours a day. "Well, you know, little Jimmy is just such a good sleeper. He takes two solid 2 -hour naps during the day and at 6:30 pm he just climbs into bed on his own and sleeps until 8 the next morning." I'm just looking at her like:
We can't be friends.
The worst part about having kids who are horrible sleepers is that other people judge you so harshly. Surely if you were a good parent your kids would sleep better. Then they give you advice. We have tried it all: no sugar, white noise, cry it out, routines, warm milk, standing on our heads. Truly we have. We just accepted that we were never going to sleep again....until now.
Ten years of consistent interrupted sleep does take a toll on you. Let's take a look:
Before 10 Years of Sleep Deprivation:
After 10 Years of Sleep Deprivation:
Before 10 Years of Sleep Deprivation :
After 10 Years of Sleep Deprivation:
Before 10 Years of Sleep Deprivation:
After 10 Years of Sleep Deprivation:
Before 10 years of Sleep Deprivation:
After 10 years of Sleep Deprivation:
Before 10 years of Sleep Deprivation:
After 10 years of Sleep Deprivation:
(This is my husband, holding what is left of my brain in a jar. See how 10 years of sleep deprivation has aged him? He is screaming inside: What did you do to my wife?)
Now, don't confuse uninterrupted sleep with sleeping-in because I have another 5 years for that, I think. I was so excited last night because my 8 year old slept over a friends house which meant she would not wake me up at 5:51 am like she usually does on Saturday. I crawled into bed imagining how glorious it would be to sleep until 8 am.
Until the alarm clock went off at 6 am this morning. My husband set the alarm clock to SIX f***in AM on a Saturday when my daughter is gone. I hate him so much for it. I tried to go back to bed. I tried so hard but it was to no avail. I needed it. I have ten whole years of sleep to catch up on. Mom problems.
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