Somewhere during the first or second month of being a new parent, you will be up in the middle of the night with your new baby. It will be approximately three o’clock in the morning and you will have already achieved three delightful pockets of sleep that night for fifteen minutes each. There will be a beautiful moon in the sky and the stars will be twinkling. But you will not notice. You will be staring into the face of your darling infant, who is truly darling, except that at this particular moment he is screaming so hard that you wonder if his lungs will liberate from him chest.
You will bounce him, jiggle him, nurse him, rock him. Still screaming. You will walk with him around the block. Still screaming. You will put him in his vibrating bouncy chair. Still screaming. You will put his bouncy chair on top of the dryer and turn the dryer on. Still screaming. You will swaddle him like a baby burrito. You will take his temperature. You will offer a pacifier. You will shake a rattle in his face. More screaming. You will put him in the car and go for a drive. More and more screaming. You will come home and find your earplugs. Quieter screaming. You will push your earplugs deeper into your ears, strap your baby to your chest and work out on the treadmill for thirty minutes.
You get off the treadmill and look at the baby. He’s asleep. Gently, gently you tiptoe over to the bouncy chair (which is the only place your baby currently sleeps). Gently, gently you un-strap the baby from the Baby Bjorn. You carefully snuggle him into the bouncy chair. You reach over to grab a blanket. When you turn back, the baby’s eyes wide open and he is smiling at you.
You look at the clock and it says 4:26 a.m. And you think, “Will I ever sleep again?”
It is for this reason that most bookstores have entire shelves devoted to “Sleep Solutions for your Baby.” Babies (and children, for that matter) are notoriously good at keeping their parents from getting adequate rest. The newborn stage is particularly frustrating because it is so hard to understand what they are feeling and why they won’t sleep. Whenever people come to visit you during the daytime, your baby is pleasantly dozing in the bouncy chair. Oh, what a sweet baby, your visitors say. He sleeps so peacefully.
Yes, you think. He sleeps so peacefully during the day. But at night, he either wants to play or turns into Babyzilla who won’t stop crying and shrieking.
The Million Dollar Answer
Will I ever sleep again? This is a good question. And the answer depends primarily on a couple of factors:
- Your babies biological sleep needs
- Your style of parenting
I am of the wacky, attachment parenting, family-bed model and the answer for me is, well, not really.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve made the choice to sleep with my children and to nurse both my babies, day and night, whenever they ask me. My boys both depend on me to go to sleep. Even the older one, who is almost five, still needs me to cuddle with him in order to fall asleep at night.
I am happy with my choice because I believe that it has helped to build an amazing sense of trust in our relationship. But it has definitely been a serious sacrifice in sleep and required me to be a lot more involved with their nighttime needs than many parents might tolerate.
Most people in our culture would not make the choice to nurse their children, on-demand, day and night, for multiple years and understandably so. However, even without choosing to sleep with your children and nurse them on-demand, there is still an intense period of sleep deprivation that all parents endure.
