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Wakey wakey
Now look – in my defence – I was reeling from lack of sleep, had two molten melons under my chin and was still smeared in iodine from my Caesarean section. It hurt to sit up. It hurt to lie down. It hurt to feed my new baby. It hurt to be. It also hurt to put him in his cot – and he just cried all the time when I did.
I’m sorry, forgive me, but the road of least resistance was the only one without cones, traffic lights and arsey BMW drivers on it. So I went down it. OK?
That was three weeks after Alex was born. I knew I’d settle him into his own cot soon.… He was currently sleeping each night under my right armpit.
His dad didn’t mind. Attuned only to wake when his wife joined in with the screaming, he let us both be.
Newspaper articles outlining the benefits of babies sleeping with parents vindicated me. Even if he did fall out a couple of times and commune with the dust and old shoes under the bed. He never complained much.
It was interesting and slightly eerie too, how I was a constant sentinel for him – even while asleep. More than once, I stirred, reached out and gathered him to me one beat before his dad slapped an arm across the bed where his son had just been. But this was really part of the problem.
Being a baby sentinel doesn’t do much for your REM sleep
While Alex thrived in the warm glow of his parent’s love and his mother’s armpit (his head often smelled of Right Guard), the mother in question was slowly losing her tenuous grip on sanity.
It appals me to tell you that at the age of one, Alex was still sleeping with me. By now, it was in a single bed in another room, because at least one of his parents had to sleep properly, and now bigger, noisier and given to giggling in the early hours, Alex wasn’t such an easy bedmate.
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