“Sleep When the Baby Sleeps” is B$.
Anyone care to congratulate me with a well-deserved bottle of Veuve? I just slept four consecutive nights without a single bout of insomnia. FOUR WHOLE NIGHTS! My new personal record of the last 19 months. (Disclaimer, I took melatonin twice this week. But two of those nights were all my own doing).
I’d heard of postpartum depression, postpartum weight gain, postpartum everything. But I didn’t know about postpartum insomnia until two months ago. Of all the things I Googled at 2 AM this past year, why not “why haven’t I slept since my kid was born?” I have floundered in sleeplessness since the day my daughter arrived, and never once thought that just maybe this was her fault. (Edit: I am of course not a monster who is blaming my toddler for my insomnia. But, you know… would it have happened without her?)
Sleep loss was my second biggest worry when preparing for a baby. Breastfeeding was my biggest fear; more on that another time. I studied engineering in college, so I’ve experienced severe sleep deprivation before. And I know that it makes my skin oily, my eyes baggy, and kills every desire I have to go to the gym. So, for all obvious aesthetic reasons, I wasn’t thrilled about a 7 lb. 2 oz. bundle of joy robbing my snoozes.
Enter the grandparent reassurances: “It’s over so soon! You won’t even remember the sleepless nights!” “That stage is gone in the blink of an eye! Just wait, before you know it, you’ll be trying to wake up your teenager.” And, my personal (not) favorite: “You’ll be fine! Just sleep when the baby sleeps!”
OK. That last one? That’s baloney. Lies. Utter. Horse. Shit. Do you know what I did the first time my baby slept? I got freaking poked with needles at the hospital. And then had my catheter removed. And then the nurses made me walk for the first time (I know, I know, walking is a good thing after a C-section, but for the love of all that is good she was SLEEPING!) And then, someone from the hospital staff decided to dust the ceiling in my room. I am not kidding you. I was so delirious that I told them “Please stop, I’ll just dust it later.” I did not, in fact, dust the ceiling of my hospital room later. 48 more hours passed and we were home. I realized that I hadn’t slept in three nights.
Once the pain killers wore off (ah, the sweet blissful state of Oxycodone induced euphoria), the worry set in. So now even though I was at our own home, whenever Zary slept I thought about whether she was still breathing. Was she hot? Did she just poop again? Oh no, I bet she’s cold. Is that sound normal? I finally feel like I’m going to sleep, I bet she’s going to wake up again hungry any minute. And then before long I started to worry about me. Why does my incision still hurt? What the %$&# is Pupps Rash and why is it all over my butt? My boobs are so big – you mean I have to pump AT NIGHT TIME, too? As a last hurrah to ensuring I’d never sleep again, the snuggle monster in the bassinet next to me gifted us with “Grunting Baby Syndrome” – go ahead and laugh. And then go YouTube some videos of it and you can learn about my personal version of hell.
It all sucked.
By the time I was a mom for two weeks, I was terrified of sleep. I was clocking 45-minute stretches at best, and my husband (thank the LORD for 6 weeks paternity leave) was doing the heavy lifting keeping us all alive. On the night before my 30th birthday, I slept an hour and a half total. My baby Zarrin slept 10 hours. I remember Nick heading off to work at 5 AM while I was nursing the baby. “Get some sleep, sweetheart” he said as he kissed me goodbye. I could have hurled a chair at him. I didn’t, because, the baby. Instead I snapped something about it not being up to me whether I slept or not. I was really not at my best. My husband is a dreamboat and doesn’t deserve for me to even think about throwing things at him.
That weekend, suddenly and mercifully, Zary started sleeping in 4-hour stretches and I learned about Mack’s Silicone Earplugs (bye bye grunting baby!) This progress meant I could change her, nurse her, rock her, lay in bed worrying about all the things that were going to go wrong, and still sleep for a 2-hour chunk myself. Woo hoo!
And that’s how the first year and half of my daughter’s life went by. Any time I got up to pee, or the baby cried in her sleep, or my husband’s phone went off, I lost two hours of sleep. I spent eternity in bed unsuccessfully chasing sleep. Nick and I would celebrate the rare nights where I fell back asleep in “only” an hour. Fellow moms who comforted my fatigue with “just sleep when the baby sleeps!” were thanked with some not-so-subtle eye rolls. “When the baby sleeps” was the one time of the day my mind was free enough to worry. And I was worrying enough to steamroll any possibility of sleep.
Early in 2020 I was surfing Instagram and saw a post about chronic postpartum insomnia. A) I didn’t know that was a thing. B) I realized that at some point in 2018, I had just given up and decided that insomnia was my new normal. Was this my curse of motherhood? Will it ever go away? Does it get worse after the next baby? And the next? Fending off a panic attack, I called my doctor and pleaded for her to fix me. My doctor is an ACE at recommending specialists. Rather than hooking me up with sleeping pills or a sleep doctor, she sent me to a sleep psychologist with a 96% success rate. In her take, there was nothing actually wrong with me physically or hormonally. I must have taught myself to have insomnia, so I just needed a psychologist to teach me how not to have it.
Inevitably it happened that I visited the sleep psychologist the same week the world got quarantined by COVID-19. The first part of his “sleep training” is a very aggressive immersion in 3 weeks of serious, intentional, calculated sleep deprivation meant to reset your body. The second part is all about relaxation techniques, attitudes around sleep, and healthy sleep environments. I’m quarantined with a toddler right now so I skipped that first part. I mean, I can’t even dump my kid off at the neighbors’ house to get a break. Why would I do that to myself? But just doing the second 50% of his program has fixed the worst of my insomnia – When I am lying awake, it’s only for 60 minutes max. And I’m pretty regularly waking up refreshed for the first time ever as a mom. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for now. As soon as we’re all released back to our normal lives, I’m actually eager to finish the program, self-inflicted sleep deprivation and all. I want to sleep like my husband – he passed out in the middle of a sentence last night.
I’m sure as we have more kids and I become an expert (ha), I will have all kinds of tips and tricks to dish out totally unsolicited. But one thing I promise you, I will NEVER tell a new mom to “just sleep when the baby sleeps!” Because that advice is BS.