I miss sleep. I mean obviously I do sleep. I miss unbroken sleep. I miss waking up naturally. I even miss the reliability of the alarm going off (I have not needed an alarm since FBS was born nearly five years ago). I miss going to bed and knowing i will not have to get out again until morning. I know I'm banging on, but this is what years of broken sleep does to you. You become a little bit obsessive.
At the moment a lot of my friends have just, or are about to give birth, some for the first time. Nothing can prepare you for this part of parenting. Sometimes you might hear a heavily pregnant woman musing that she isn't sleeping well and perhaps this is preparation for the baby coming. It isn't. Until you have been deep in slumber and then woken in the most brutal of ways - then made to stay awake for..say half an hour..an hour..maybe more, then you have no idea. Welcome to the first 6 weeks of parenthood (6 if you're lucky).
After that then of course you don't get a through nights sleep - but with a bit of luck the night time disturbances have been reduced to 2 or 3 times most nights. Before I had FBS I thought that one day your child,"slept through", and that was it ..end of..job done. But no! This,"sleeping through", sometimes happens by shear fluke and then is not repeated for 6 months! A child who has started "sleeping through", gets sick or goes on holiday and you're back to square one. I could more or less say FBS "slept through" by the time he was 18 months, but even now he will disturb me after a bad dream or wetting the bed, (recently he decided to go to bed in a batman costume complete with mask and woke at 2am sweating profusely and gasping for a drink!)
At baby clinics and the like there is always a mother who boasts that her child has been sleeping through since they were 2 weeks old. Here are my thoughts on this:
The mother is clearly on medication and cannot hear her child
The child is lacking in character and/or intellect
This mother will get hers eventually...I bet this child ends up with an ASBO
Most parents I know end up having to employ some kind of "tough love" strategy to get a reasonable night sleep. TD still wakes once or twice most nights. Usually it's a case of putting her dummy back in and she goes back to sleep. I could live with this if I could then jump back in the sack and go straight back to sleep. But no. Firstly, to be frank my pelvic floor is not what it was, and the minute I am woken I need to pee.
Secondly once back in bed my mind starts going. You're a stay at home mum I hear you cry, what's to think about? God only knows but it happens.
Thirdly Mr. B starts snoring and i'm really unhappy. This is all worse when it happens at 5am, cos then the likelihood of me getting back to sleep before TD wakes at 6am for the morning is slim to none.
To any new parents reading, good luck. Start sky plusing any good TV on after 9pm....
Love
Kerry B xx
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