Wakey wakey

Within an hour or two he’d be awake and screaming. Trying to ignore him, as any mother will tell you, was like trying to watch Eastenders or eat cottage pie while a surgeon removes your innards without anaesthetic.

By day I was a zombie. At work I would struggle to remember people’s names, seconds after they’d told me. I had to write everything down. Things like – ‘Alex with Nana today – pick up at 4pm. Eat food. The ringing thing is a phone. Other son called Jacob…’

I wasn’t alone

During this dim hazy period, I heard of others trapped in my misty, semi-coherent hinterland. I know of two families where the mother or father – sometimes both – would literally go to bed in the same room, at the same time as their baby or toddler.

This, they believed, was the only way. If mum and dad were going to bed, little Lucy would go too. If mum or dad later tried to sneak from the room to watch ER or laugh out loud, Lucy would shortly wake and vocally unleash the hounds of hell…

The torment finally ended, simply, and more quickly than I can believe, when Alex was 13 or 14 months old. By now flaky, grey, tinged with madness –I finally got some sleep clinic advice from the surgery health visitor.

It all seems quite obvious now, what we were doing wrong

Alex was being lulled to sleep on the chest of a parent, after his big (and much more biddable) brother had gone to bed, and then placed carefully in his cot. And when he next woke up, in the dark, both parents were gone and he didn’t know where the heck he was. Understandably, he started screaming.